Japanese power-supply vendors see engineers as competitive advantages
( 01 Sep 2006 )
Margery Conner Technical Editor, EDN
Are you feeling a twinge of fear about all those well-educated Chinese engineers who may right now be working on a design that competes with your company’s product? Warnings in the business and trade media are currently bombarding engineers in the United States and Europe that well-educated, relatively low-paid Chinese engineers present a seemingly insurmountable threat to their US and European livelihoods. Consider how some Japanese companies have successfully responded to the same threat.
Now a bastion of quality engineering, Japan was a generation ago firmly ensconced in the high volume, low-margin end of the business spectrum, the traditional way for a cheap labor country to enter the world market. However, part of the package deal of success is that wages of both professional and unskilled workers rise, and, if cheap labor is the only advantage a country has, it’s in danger from the next upstart region.
Many US power-supply vendors fixate on the low end, cost-driven portion of the power-system business and exhibit lukewarm interest in and commitment to developing digital-power technology for future designs. The most common refrain is that price drives the power supply business and that any technology that adds to the cost of a power supply can kill the product’s competitiveness.
On the other hand, a Japanese power-supply vendor, such as Lambda/TDK, supports three digital-power R&D efforts in three divisions. According to Hiroyuki Yashiro, chief technology officer for Lambda/TDK, the company assumes that, within three years, digital power technology will play a significant role in the company’s products. And Bellnix , a relatively small Japanese vendor of point of- load converters, a notoriously cutthroat market, is now selling digital-power technology-based converters. These companies realize that their futures lie in high end designs for the non-commodity markets. If they rely on bare-bones designs with little added engineering value, Chinese vendors will outsell them.
Why can’t China duplicate Lambda/TDK’s know-how in switching power supplies, as it has in consumer markets, such as cell phones? Says Takeo Suzuki, president of Lambda/TDK, “Chinese companies have been successful in competing in the cellphone market because they can easily buy the enabling technology, such as special purpose processors, from Silicon Valley. That’s not the case in high-end-power supply design. The know how resides in Lambda’s engineers.
Keithley Instruments
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