The production of memory modules at Dane-Elec

The Irish factory is located near Galway, a city with about 70.000 inhabitants. They have about 140 employees, who work in three shifts to keep the five production lines - divided across a large hall with a size of approximately 2300 square meters - running 24 hours a day 365 days a year. If needed, they can make about 20.000 memory modules a day.

Earlier, this kind of capacity was needed very much to meet demand, and they even thought about expansion for a while. Nowadays the market is a lot less demanding, and because of that, the factory only runs at a 100% around Christmas. A factory like this does not use mass production. You can order dozens of different types of modules. The software the machinery uses can be changed within a few minutes to use different PCB's or components. They made hundreds of these programs for all kinds of different memory chips and components - ranging from EDO-SIMM to RDRAM.

The latter one is not produced in Galway. The testing equipment for RDRAM is very expensive, and because there is a relatively low demand for RDRAM, Dane-Elec decided to buy this kind of memory somewhere else and to just distribute it. Products like cardreaders and Smartmedia cards follow the same principle as RDRAM.


Besides the large range of products and the security of the warehouse there is another important argument not to work with large stocks. Money. The prices on the memory chips market are, as everybody knows, strongly under the influence of fluctuating prices. To keep the damage to a minimum they buy their products 'on-spot'. Various companies - i.e. Toshiba, Samsung and Infineon - store their chips in a large vault within the Dane-Elec factory. Although the memory is ready to use, it remains property of the companies mentioned above. As soon as an order arrives at Dane-Elec for modules and the chips are removed from the vault for production, the actual transfer takes place for the, at that moment, going price. The advantage of this is, that the modules can profit directly from price changes.

An impression of the production hall

Productionline number 2

Dane-Elec is not (yet) that big to make their own chips, and they don’t have a real 'cleanroom' like Intel or AMD use to place their wafferscanners. But they do try to keep the production room as clean and dust free as possible. This is to prevent that dust particles ruin a memory module by creating a faulty contact. Static electricity is another problem for the plant. Every desk has anti-static on it and everybody who wishes to enter the plant has to use a special jacket and an ankle-bracelet to ground themselves.