Inside Samsung's Galaxy S8 Testing Facility

Information technology takes well-nigh four,500 pounds of force to make a Samsung Galaxy S8 battery explode. I know because I saw it at Samsung'southward test center: a metal plate slamming downwards difficult on the bombardment with a ker-chunk, then a break, and and then the flames.

Fortunately, that's far more than strength than most people can deliver. It's more the weight of a Toyota Camry or a Honda Accord. It'south about the weight of an adult rhinocerous, merely call up, that's the whole rhino—not just one foot.

Samsung took PCMag to its manufactory in Gumi, Korea, where it makes Galaxy S8 phones for AT&T and Verizon, to show off its eight-bespeak battery safety check in the wake of the Galaxy Annotation 7 disaster.

"We're sharing why information technology happened, what happened, and why it won't happen again," Samsung EVP of global marketing, YH Lee, told me separately at Samsung's headquarters in Suwon, Korea. "I think we can regain a trivial bit of trust, and we are seeing our customers as generous enough to say that, 'I believe in Samsung, and a 1-time error is excusable.'"

To that extent, Samsung held a lunch with its "battery advisory group" of chemistry professors from Cambridge and Berkeley, and led a few of us on a tour of its product plant, with a focus on safety. I've been to the Gumi establish earlier, where legions of immature women fit circuit boards into shiny phone cases while huge robots trundle around carrying heavy loads of boxes.

The Galaxy S8 construction process is a lot more than automated than when I saw the Galaxy S5 congenital in 2022. Cases and screens get shipped in from other plants. Robots, which look similar behemothic printers, adhere fries to circuit boards, which humans press into the phone cases and snap together. Then other robots run the phones through a battery of tests, spitting out phones that fail. That happens surprisingly often: while I was continuing in front of the USB OTG testing car, a phone popped out with a big mark slash beyond it.

It takes about xiii minutes to put together a concrete phone, or one-half an hour including software loads, Samsung reps said.

Humans come up back into play in the "accelerated usage examination," a new level of QA that's come into play after the Note 7 mess. The AUT consists of five days of fast charging, discharging, dunking phones in water, and putting them through the paces of browsing, calling, Facebooking, and game playing. While camera testing was existence washed by technicians, a rack full of phones in another room scrolled through an automatic browsing test. Since Gumi makes phones for the Us and Korea, the room had simulated Us and Korean networks—probably the only place in Korea where your AT&T telephone would get a Ring 17 point.

Not every telephone gets tested; there's some sampling going on. On the "battery life cycle" examination rack, where refurbished Note 7s were interim as webcams over racks of new Galaxy S8s, Samsung was testing 300 phones out of the first 15,000 made by churning their batteries through 400 accuse cycles in 50 days. That'due south typically well-nigh a year and a half of use.

But Samsung'south doing a lot more samples than it used to. In a room with big, cheerful stickers reading "Safety Always!" two white-coated engineers disassembled a battery nether a ventilation hood to check for assembly bug. That'south a test that used to only be done by the battery manufacturers.

"We didn't do the teardown test of the battery with the Note seven," Koh pointed out.

Another room had the crude-and-tumble tests, which I've seen other manufacturers and carriers practise, like the 4-foot drib to concrete (which didn't break the Galaxy S8'due south new Gorilla Glass 5 screen); the fake human butt wearing jeans, sitting downward with the phone in a back pocket; and that metal press, which doesn't usually evangelize 4,500 pounds of strength.

Three out of the eight battery-related tests are new, Samsung said: the charge-discharge and accelerated usage tests I just described, also as a "full volatile organic compounds" test looking for leakage from the batteries.

"Meaningful innovation should keep going, but on elevation of it, we will go along as a top priority customer safety," Samsung mobile CEO DJ Koh said. "It will take time, merely I strongly believe I can bring our customers' trust back."

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/mobile-phones/14808/inside-samsungs-galaxy-s8-testing-facility

Posted by: mcgillfornow.blogspot.com

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