sTec, Inc

Implementing the highest quality control in design and manufacturing

sTec implements superlative quality control procedures to ensure enterprise-level reliability in its solid-state drives. Quality is engineered into each SSD from inception with appropriate design tolerances, component selection, and conservative component derating. Quality control procedures in manufacturing include environmental stress testing of drives and a proprietary test system called TDBI (Test During Burn-In) for DRAM DIMMs to identify components with the potential for early field failure. sTec headquarters in California and its manufacturing site in Penang, Malaysia, are both ISO certified as well.

The overall goal of the sTec SSD testing methodology is to ensure a quality product and to catch defects that less rigorous testing methodologies may not. All sTec SSDs go through a comprehensive set of steps designed to fully exercise the drive and reduce infant mortality defects. After the drive’s power supply circuitry is verified and controller firmware is loaded, the interface is checked. Each drive is then placed in a thermal chamber and each block is read/write tested while cycling through and beyond the temperature range for which that product is sold. In other words, for industrial temperature drives rated to operate at -40oc to +85oc, each would actually be tested from -45oc to +90oc. This stress testing is optimized to weed out defects so that they are not shipped to our customers. This all-encompassing approach to drive testing ensures that we deliver product that lives up to our customers’ 24/7 expectations.

To improve the reliability of DRAM in its solid-state drives, sTec developed and implemented a proprietary test system TDBI that runs dynamic test patterns on a large number of DRAM DIMMs while undergoing thermal and electrical stress to identify and remove chips with “weak” bits so they are not shipped to customers. As newer DRAMs advance into smaller process geometries, there is an increase in chips containing microscopic defects in individual cells that are not serious enough to cause a failure outright, but will start exhibiting itself after of few months of field operation. sTec places the DIMMs in a thermal chamber that raises the temperature as high as 125 C and a voltage as high as 3.5 volts and then tested at a 100% utilization rate for many hours, which provides the equivalent of 3 to 6 months of early operating lifetime in a much shorter period of time. TDBI improves DIMM module MTBF by an estimated factor of 2 to 10 times, ultimately enhancing the field reliability of sTec SSDs.

sTec’s US headquarters and Penang manufacturing site are ISO 9001 certified for quality management. The Penang site is also ISO 14001 certified for environmental management as well as RoHS and OHSAS 18000 compliant. Quality control audits are regularly used to verify and make certain that procedures are in place and followed to ensure reproducible quality with every step in the process. Ongoing reliability tests are performed to monitor initial quality as well as long-term reliability of the SSDs we produce. The net result for all sTec customers is a final product with fewer than industry average infant mortality rates and reduced long-term support costs.

Benefits

Solid-state drives with exceptionally high reliability that enterprises can depend on.

sTec implements superlative quality control procedures to ensure enterprise-level reliability in its solid-state drives.