Kingston Technology Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, sells and supports flash memory products, other computer-related memory products, as well as the HyperX gaming division. Headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, United States, Kingston Technology employs more than 3,000 employees worldwide as of Q1 2016. The company has manufacturing and logistics facilities in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Taiwan, and China.
Sign at top of Fountain Valley headquarters, pictured in 2007
A Kingston USB flash drive with 8 GB capacity
A Kingston CompactFlash card with 1 GB capacity
A pair of Kingston HyperX DDR2 modules
Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both use the same cell design, consisting of floating gate MOSFETs. They differ at the circuit level depending on whether the state of the bit line or word lines is pulled high or low: in NAND flash, the relationship between the bit line and the word lines resembles a NAND gate; in NOR flash, it resembles a NOR gate.
A disassembled USB flash drive in 2005. The chip on the left is flash memory. The controller is on the right.
NOR flash by Intel
Serial Flash: Silicon Storage Tech SST25VF080B
An Intel mSATA SSD in 2020