What does a power semiconductor assembly company actually do?..and why?

[ocset]

Hi,
Do you know what this sort of company actually do?....

https://www.ppi-uk.com/assemblies/

…I mean, they  purport to make power semiconductor assemblies for multi-kilowatt power supplies.

This seems very odd to me…..i  mean, if you could do that, wouldn’t you just make the  whole power supply anyway? Why just do the  attachment of the power semiconductor to the heatsink?

Surely the overall power supply designer would want to do the power semiconductor heatsinking themselves anyway?
How can companies like this make money?

I cant imagine designing a power supply and then saying…oh yeah, we’ll outsource the power semiconductor heatsinking/assembly  etc to a private company…..surely that can't be done?….its an intrinsic part of the power supply and the power supply designer should do it?

Am I wrong?

[MK14]

This seems very odd to me…..

Am I wrong?

Apparently, yes.

E.g. A company may make lots of transistors.
That is fine, they don't have to turn the transistors into products (e.g. radios), or start a metal mine in South Africa, to get the raw metals, to make the transistor leads from.
They can just make and sell millions of transistors.

[T3sl4co1l]

Makes sense, getting the switching loop right is the hardest part of power design, and a lot of power design engineers are awful at it (when's the last time you heard someone brag about their bucket of blown transistors?).  And thermal design being the next hardest thing.

It's not much of a market, low quantities, low value-add, but I guess they do enough to bother.

Tim

[ocset]

Thanks, another point is that its strange to see such a company based in UK...i mean, there are no big British Power Electronics companies anyway. So i cant imagine who uses the services of PPi.

I mean.......the drives for our naval fleet are made by the French in France...our trains are made by the Germans in Germany etc etc...

[ataradov]

Hey, it is treez is complaining again that nothing is made in the UK, even though he himself provides the evidence to the contrary. Have you considers that the problem is in you?

[eti]

I'd think, assemble power semiconductors. 

[SiliconWizard]

Hey, it is treez is complaining again that nothing is made in the UK, even though he himself provides the evidence to the contrary. Have you considers that the problem is in you?

Yes, this one was "interesting"!
After showing many examples of stuff not being made in the UK anymore, now he finds some that are still made in the UK AND questions the relevance. 
(Which is not completely contradictory, because he seems to be CONVINCED that it can't be done, even when there's proof it can.)

And I think it's relevant to what we have repeatedly said earlier: it'll be pretty hard to directly COMPETE (do the same thing, basically) with eastern companies, but there still are numerous niches/services in which companies can still develop in Europe. Instead of questioning the relevance, treez should probably try and learn WHY those work, and take the appropriate steps.

[schmitt trigger]

Several decades ago, when I worked at a company which made very high power industrial products, the part of the product which was the most challenging was the metal fabrication area.

Just look at one the enlarged images, to see the amount of sheet metal and metal bars that have to be cut, bent, formed into shape, welded, brazed, tapped or chamfered.  Many times the individual components could weigh several kilograms and its surfaces had to be machined with high precision.

When all the parts were finished, they had to be anodized, painted, powder coated, plated or any other surface finish.

In some extreme cases, we would cast or extrude large components with outside contractors and finish them ourselves.

That this company can perform all of these operations, and provide you with a fully assembled module, is a significant value adder.

[free_electron]

What they are doing is closer to plumbing and welding than electronics.. busbars, massive heatsinks, fans. That is a specialty in itself , especially when dealing with high currents and voltage. Clearances ,air gaps etc.. don't underestimate this

[dmills]

Yep, seems like a perfectly valid thing to do as a specialist.

Particularly if you are building custom drives or inverters or something for some special purpose, the control electronics and software may well be where your value add is, but you need all that heavy current stuff with funky busbars to minimise loop areas and annoying sheet metal, I could see subcontracting that stuff.

Microprocessor and DSP geeks don't usually turn out to be good at hundred kW class IGBTs snubbers, caps, and fans.

There are UK companies that play in this space, I interviewed at one a few years back, game was inverters for turbo alternators used as exhaust energy recovery plants on BIG marine engines. Aparently the trick was that if the inverter ever dropped the load on the turbine the thing would destructively overspeed in a matter of seconds.
No fuses there!
 
There are lots of weird little highly specialist providers like that who might be entirely happy to outsource the high power and magnetic components for this sort of thing.

Adaptive power and harmonic filters for grid connected loads, another place where most of the value is in the DSP, but you need a really butch power stage and some **big** caps.

[Zbig]

[tooki]

Hi,
Do you know what this sort of company actually do?....

https://www.ppi-uk.com/assemblies/

…I mean, they  purport to make power semiconductor assemblies for multi-kilowatt power supplies.

This seems very odd to me…..i  mean, if you could do that, wouldn’t you just make the  whole power supply anyway? Why just do the  attachment of the power semiconductor to the heatsink?

Surely the overall power supply designer would want to do the power semiconductor heatsinking themselves anyway?
How can companies like this make money?

I cant imagine designing a power supply and then saying…oh yeah, we’ll outsource the power semiconductor heatsinking/assembly  etc to a private company…..surely that can't be done?….its an intrinsic part of the power supply and the power supply designer should do it?

Am I wrong?

Oh for fuck’s sake, dude... 😒

Ever heard of specialization? Of cottage industries? There are thousands (perhaps millions) of little companies around the world specializing in some oddball niche thing. For crying out loud, not even the biggest companies in the world make every part for their products: they farm it out to a specialist supplier for each part.

Honestly, man, and I do not say this as a joke, you should leave electronics and find some other career for which you have even the tiniest sliver of aptitude. Because electronics ain’t it.

[coppercone2]

it allows people to enter a market easily but there might be strong value added to a company if you can do that stuff yourself, but it requires alot of tooling and fabrication people to pull that off. its likely very expensive


I.e. cost of real bus bar:
https://www.hawkusa.com/manufacturers/marinco/connectors/777-bb4s-500?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5KHOlqnk6QIVAY_ICh10wApmEAYYASABEgI_6_D_BwE

ANd they might work things out with custom extrusion people for economical heatsinks. If someone there has connections and knows how to deal with extruder industry / is willing, you can save alot of money and make it specialized. If a noob did it, it would probobly be CNC machined or something, and be very expensive. Makes sense for them since they can decide what package size transistor ecosystem they want to work with.

[coppice]

"Formerly the Power Assembly Division of International Rectifier. Power Products International have been designing and manufacturing power rectifier, thyristor and latterly IGBT assemblies for over forty years.". I guess IR had this division in the UK from the long gone past when the UK was a major centre for switched mode power products, felt it didn't fit their overall business, and spun it off. There is usually a market for modularising hard to develop functions, especially ones where a specialist can offer interesting packaging. This tends to appeal to smaller manufacturers, as it can fill gaps in their expertise, and minimise their R&D spend.