Time to market...The key to the power supply distribution market is speed of response to customers, says Richard Wilson A custom design capability is not simply a piece of marketing jargon in the power supply systems market. As much as a fifth of the power system market is dependent on customised products.
Manufacturers have been offering custom power supplies for as long as power supplies have been designed into electronic equipment. So it was somehow inevitable that a greater proportion of the custom power supply business would find its way into the distribution sector.
For the distributor, a design, and in some cases even an in-house manufacturing capability, does not come cheap, however the rewards can be high, with customised products inevitably carrying higher margins than standard products.
Design and manufacturing… Acal Power Solutions produced this adaptor board for the Power Trends PT5100 and PT6300 families of integrated switching regulators. It is price competitive in the market, and it would not have been possible to produce without an in-house design capability.
At one end of the scale there is a distributor like XPwhich is competing head-on with the market leading manufacturer of customisable multi-output power supplies, Coutant Lambda.
XP provides pre-configured supplies from Astec's VS series, which range in power output from 2,000W down to 50W, in as little as a couple of days for first samples. For XP the configurable business is of growing importance. "It has doubled in the last year," says XP's managing director, James Peters. "We are the only facility doing this for Astec in the UK."
Arguably Coutant Lambda is the supplier to beat in the configurable supply market. Its Alpha range of customisable multi-output supplies can be prototyped in a couple of days by the supplier. The range includes 400W and 600W AC/DC modular power supplies and now extends down to the 250W power level.
According to Coutant's sales director, Martin Southam, the key to the configurable market is speed of response to the customer. "Providing production volumes on very short notice is key for OEMs in this market," points out Southam, who claims that production volumes can be provided in four weeks.
Pangbourne-based XP offers both product modification and full custom design of power systems. It claims to meet a two or three day turn-around on some design work in three power ranges; 50 to 1600W, 400 to 800W and 750 to 2000W.
This is achieved by building up custom systems from a series of standard modules. An example is the VS series of modular switched mode power supplies, which XP says can be configured from stock and despatched in two to three days.
Chloride Powerline is another distributor with an in-house design capability. Semi-custom design is carried out in-house for products ranging from supplies of less than1W to greater than 100kW. But like many other distributors Powerline will also take on full custom power supply designs even if this means that it uses a third party manufacturer to produce the product.
Acal Power Solutions is a power component distributor which benefits from being part of an electronics group with its own substantial manufacturing capability.
According to Steve Sessions, sales manager at Acal Power Solutions, customised products make up around 20 per cent of the distributor's business, but the proportion is growing rapidly. "In the next two years I expect value-added percentage of the business to make up well over half of the total," says Sessions.
A recent example of how this design and manufacturing capability has extended Acal's distribution business has been the design of an evaluation board for use with DC/DCpower modules from its largest franchise, Vicor. Then there is the adaptor board the company has produced for the Power Trends PT5100 and PT6300 families of integrated switching regulators.
The tiny adaptor, designed and manufactured by Acal, converts the TO-220 and SIPfootprints of the Power Trends devices into a standard centre-pin 2in. x 1in. format. It is a simple product, but it is price competitive in the market, and it would not have been possible to produce without an in-house design capability.
At the other end of the scale, a distributor like Acal can take on the design of a complete power supply for a customer. A recent example that Sessions gives was the design of a power supply system for an avionics firm, to power one of its in-flight recorder systems.
Sessions is quick to point out that the market for separate power components like DC/DCconverters is not diminishing. The greater use of distributed power systems will certainly ensure that that will not happen.
But he is seeing a certain group of customers who are increasingly willing to pass greater levels of the power supply design in their products over to the supplier.
While designers should be wary of those distributors who have set up just a token in-house design capability, there are certainly distributors that are adding a substantial product design and manufacturing capability to their core power component supply businesses.
To demonstrate how far the role of the power supply distributor has progressed in recent years, Sessions gives another example, of how Acal completed the design of a supply for a specific customer and then posted a 3Dimage of the finished supply on the Web within three days so that the customer could evaluate the design. "That's an example of what people need today," says Sessions. "It is all about time to market."