Manufacturing

YubiKey production

In our production plant in the forests of Sweden, we have invented a new, fully automated way to manufacture USB keys – in one solid piece of plastic.

The YubiKey tooling is made of a single piece of steel where five YubiKeys are made in one machine cycle. Handling of electronics and finished parts is performed with an industrial robot. The “brain” of the YubiKey in the form of a circuit board is taken by the robot arm from a tray using suction.  The robot inserts the circuit boards in the 50 ton injection molding machine while at the same time removes the finished YubiKeys from the previous cycle.

With a cycle time of just under 40 seconds, the five YubiKeys are finished, tested, programmed, laser marked with a unique identity and 2D bar code and packed in trays. This equals 450 YubiKeys per hour or about 10,000 YubiKeys per day per machine. Operator intervention is only needed when packed trays are to be replaced or trays of circuit boards are inserted.

To ensure that no secrets are stored or accessible at the manufacturing facility, Yubico uses YubiHSM Hardware Security Module technology.