General > General Technical Chat

Electronics companies should stop killing themselves

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Faringdon:
Thanks, yes i agree, but think the loan scheme is a winner.

MK14:

--- Quote from: Faringdon on June 28, 2023, 11:19:11 pm ---Thanks but i know they are not stupid, ..they are making fortunes middle-manning in the Chinese electronics....but they could stop loosing so much money in their British "token" electronics  business's if they took the advice above.
But yes , these folks are not stupid...they know that to get their hands in the pie of the  "middle-man-millions-of-pounds", they have to maintain a British (or whichever country they are in) "token" electronics company....to "oil the wheels" of the electronics import business.
You have to have that "token" electronics presence.....makes you look like you know about electronics, so that people will place orders through you for the cheap Chinese Electronics imports.

I never forget working in one "token" electronics company...they were paranoid about people seeing their token electronics schems, and then leaving......their highest power product, was a 150W led lamp which used sequence switched linear regulators....they considered this the holy grail of secrets in electronics....nobody who saw the schem could leave the company....they even tried potting over it to "cover it up"....but it was so ruddy simple, that you could literally reverse engineer it just by simply looking at the mains input current waveform to it...........the mains input current, was stair-step sine.....There were 5 steps including the top plateau, and the current sloped smoothly up from ledge to ledge......so it was ruddy obvious that it was 5 linear regs that handed over to each other as the mains rose and fell over 10ms.....it was ruddy obvious that an inverting  opamp was used to make the proceeding stage led current rise act so as to reduce the current of the preceeding stage...and then the proceeding stage, when in regulation, had its opamp output down low....so that was obviously used to turn a PNP on, and disable the preceeding stage.....i mean, it was just so obvious...you could have posted that schem over the world and it would have made no difference....bog standard electronics !!!....all already spewed out over the web anyhow.

These guys are making a massive mistake by not cycling loads of engineers through their companys....minimising the engineer count (throughput) does no good!

And as for people taking out NDA's for bog standard SMPS topologies???!!!...madness...wasting their own time and money!

Was given a 150W single stage PFC to reverse engiener once..no schem as it was "top secret"....turned out to be the bog standard PFC bias coil supply...just with the boost diode made synchronous, and then they obviously had to add software to equalise the volt-seconds on the primary.......again...bog standard....and BTW, it dropped out on no load to full load transients....and had over 3x the rated ripple in the electrolytic......."top secret" ???.......yeah right.......that company was likely just flogging that "top secret" as part of a token business........they likely make their real dosh from Chinese imports........interestingly, the "top secret" SMPS was also using a little HV Buck (SOIC8)  bias supply chip....which had markings which were non identifiable in the western world....likely from their Chinese partner.

--- End quote ---

Businesses can have Trade Secrets (protecting intellectual property), and an understanding of the wide range of the aspects of running a successful electronics business.  Is my (and with lots of ChatGPT's help), summarised answer.

I.e. I'm on the side of the business, NOT on your side.  As they are protecting their business interests, and running the business, taking lots of things into account, NOT just one aspect of things which an apparently too obsessed person, seems to perceive as the problem.

coppercone2:
they need to innovate more so they are not grasping to planks of wood in the sea.

floobydust:
Import cheap stuff from china, markup and resell. This is the modern business model.
Companies don't want to make/develop anything, they are impatient and want to buy stuff right away, off the shelf.

Developing an SMPS is gross, worked at a place an engineer spent over a year on a bog standard 25W, learning as he was going, and he wasn't any good at it, at all. Transformer design and sourcing, getting approvals including EMC, it's a lot of work and time and money.

After 12 months, management got pissed off "we don't know how to make power supplies"' and went shopping for a cheap module out of Taiwan.
As far as the cheap potted module, I found it was the usual golden sample with Chemi-con/Nichicon and active rectification, and after some failures and hot temperatures, I took another apart and inside it was cheapola electrolytics with a vanilla diode now, bodge soldered in where the active rect. mosfet used to be. Efficiency dropped and the diode ran really hot. One batch worked but had the transformer wound wrong so it blew up at high line. So you are communicating with overseas engineers that are quiet about the quality swaparoo and deny everything or tell you are misapplying the PSU.
You can only purchase the modules through their distributors... then the price went way up because you are adding a middleman who knows you designed it in.

It ends up being hell to design in some mystery brick, missing specs, russian roulette quality, short life and it eats up the BOM project budget to the point the product isn't worth it.

Building it in house, pay for an engineer with experience and they would have their own PSU at 1/10 the cost but it takes many months. Everyone was too stupid to calculate the dollars spent/saved and too impatient to grow the ability. You end up with an overpriced product that has shit reliability. Congratulations.

ataradov:
If you are not capable of sourcing decent parts from Asian suppliers directly, you can get power supplies from reliable sources.  Go to Delta, buy their stuff. They have a brand name reputation to maintain. Even if their stuff made in China, they are putting their name on it, at which point where it is made does not matter.

This is a solved problem.

"China is bad because I got sold crap on AliExpress" is a cool hobby story, but does not reflect the state of the actual industry.

And if all the domestic company doing is buying parts from Asia, but then resells them while verifying and maintaining set quality level, then this is a valid and  valuable business.

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