Taiwanese Power-Supply Makers Increasing Power of Units

Taiwan's power-supply makers, whose products power over 50% of the computers worldwide, never cease rolling out higher-power models as computers, whether for industrial or personal use, eat up more and more electricity as a result of their own increasing capacity.

Accordingly, effective heat-dissipation is a major issue. The market today rewards only those manufacturers offering a combination of high power and minimum heat generation.

The island's power-supply makers always say if you can make power supplies for computer use you can make them for all other power-hungry devices, including consumer-electronics appliances, because those for computer use are made to the most demanding specifications.

Not all computer power-supply units guarantee value for money. Most made for personal computers, the majority manufactured in China, are considered low-end products. Manufacturers retaining their roots in Taiwan have kept their products from competing head-to-head with mainland China-made products by developing feature-laden products, choosing to avoid the no-win down-market game of undercutting others' pricing structures.

The Matrix Is Real

Matrix Power Company. Focuses on high-end power supplies for industrial computers and other industrial-use devices. According to the company's chief technology officer, Eric Chang, the production costs and purchase prices for industrial-computer power supplies are much higher than for personal-computer units because the former require much greater precision and thus a much higher level of technology. "That's why power supplies for personal computers are usually offered with only a one-year warranty, whereas those for industrial computers come with a three-year guarantee," he notes.

Chang's company is one of the few Taiwanese power-supply makers producing 3,000-watt industrial-purpose models. Its MF family is patented for its excellent low-heat generation technology. "Our MF models have a design that boosts power utilization, leaving very little wasted," Chang explains.

The company's MK models, whose watt specifications range from 300 to 600, offer industry-leading heat dissipation. These machines use three fans to draw internal heat.

Since power supplies for industrial computers have more demand placed on them than do PC power supplies, the former needs more loops to protect them from burning and more devices to transmit electricity, making them heavier. "Weight is a good index for weighing the quality of a supply," Chang states. He says that his company's supply units contain 400 to 500 components, including resistors, electrolytic capacitors, transistors, and magnet components, far more than the 200 that is the minimum requirement. "Power supplies can cause fire if they are under-designed," he warns.

With 20 engineers dedicated to research and development work, utilizing the best testing equipment available in the industry, the company has earned UL and TUV safety approval as well as CE, FCC and CNS electromagnetic-interference certificates.

Matrix has few competitors in Taiwan. The group mostly supplies industrial-computer makers on the island and in the United States, Germany, and Japan. "Just like Taiwanese suppliers of PC power supplies, Taiwan's suppliers of power supplies for industrial computers dominate the world market, responsible for about 80%. But most of our products are ranked as mid-range and low-end types, so we have to put much more effort into creation of high-performance products," Chang suggests. He states that his company is now dedicated to high-performance and mid-range products.

To ensure output quality, Matrix has not moved its production to mainland China, where he says a lot of his company's domestic peers have set up facilities.

Chang and several technology experts opened the business in 2000. Their technological backgrounds have allowed the company to develop thousands of tailor-made machines based on 12 common models. "We have one of the industry's most comprehensive range of unit selections," Chang says. "Another of our advantages is that we have branches in Germany, the United States, and Japan promoting our own-brand products."

High production costs is the major disadvantage for Taiwan's power-supply manufacturers catering to industrial-computer suppliers, Chang states. He attributes the high costs mostly to Taiwan's inadequate capability in developing power-management chips, obliging the island's manufacturers to buy the chips from foreign suppliers such as Texas Instruments (TI). "Most domestic manufacturers have tried to lower production costs by paring R&D spending and labor costs," he says.

Small Is Beautiful

Best Power Solution, Inc. has carved out a niche in the power-supply market for industrial computers, servers, and data-storage systems by developing advanced, powerful mini units.


Company president Joseph Wang claims his company rolled out the industry's first mini-redundant power supply, about the size of two business-card cases. Recently, the company introduced another mini-redundant supply, the BPS320RDX, which comes with a main 350W power module and a standby. Its power supply can work normally even in an environment of 50 degrees Celsius, Wang reports.

He stresses that size has become an important issue for makers of various industrial computers such as those used for data-storage systems in banking operations, since the holding frames for the computers are usually only 19 inches wide. "Because of the limited space, peripheral-equipment suppliers like us have to help in finding space-reduction solutions," he says. Although supply casings must become smaller, power output must not be compromised. The first mini power-supply offered by Best Power had a power output of 250 watts; its latest models weigh in with 350W to 370W capacity.

Normally, industrial computers require twin-module power supplies to ensure continuous supply should the first unit fail. Recently, Wang's company has designed Internet-connectivity into its power-supply blueprint. "This design allows operators of computers to remotely scan power-load status in our supplies, helping prevent any problems. This is especially useful for equipment installed at remote facilities," Wang notes.

Best Power began developing mini power supplies as soon as it decided to move into the sector around six years ago. Moving over from PC-unit supply, as a measure to separate the company from the domestic competition, which concentrates on larger mainstream products. Although it had a bumpy start, the firm now proudly displays its UL, TUV, CE, and CB certificates.

Wang confesses that the crowded competitive arena in the PC power-supply market inspired him to leave. "Unlike personal computers, industrial computers have not been standardized, leaving the suppliers a huge latitude to design their own products," he notes. Since his company entered new sector, it has been working hard to well equip itself. Today, Best Power runs a laboratory that is qualified to conduct UL and TUV tests on power supplies and it can test temperatures ranging from minus 60 degrees Celsius to 200 degrees.

The company, Wang says, mostly ships its products to Europe and America, with its brand name on 60% to 70% of its products. Its strategy to expand its customer base is to provide the full range of design service as possible and building more peripheral parts into his products. "It is a very useful way because it allows our customers to save time and costs on the development work," he says.

After suffering a loss last year, Wang says his company saw business double in the first half this year compared to last year, selling 6,000 sets of two-module redundant power supplies.

More Power to All

Topower Computer Ind. Co., Ltd. Is known for sector-leading innovation in the world of power supplies for clone computers. Like other domestic peers, the company started with me-too types of products when it was established in 1986.

The company changed its product direction one day in 1999 when the company's president and chief executive officer (CEO) Kent Chou attended a lecture by Michael E. Porter on innovation. "Inspired by Porter's speech, we began thinking of shifting to a defined niche market, creating IP (intellectual property) and branded products. We spent nearly three months drawing up our new route," Chou says.

In that year Intel, Chou reports, awarded his company the recommendation of the world's first supplier of 400W power supplies for personal computers. At that time, 250W power supply was quite enough for average computers running games. "Our idea is when the market mainstream specifications are 300W, 350W and 400W, we will roll out 320W, 370W and 420W products. Timing for these advanced specifications may be not mature yet for average consumers, but they can stimulate demands especially from real game players who need ultra-high power supplies to allow them to play over-clocking games," Chou says, noting that an animation-intensive game tends to run into crash or freeze because of low-watt power supply.

Game players, Chou notes, are usually the major factor fostering premature markets of any computer products into maturity. "Also, products for them are much profitable than those for average users," he notes.

Recently, the company has introduced 600W and 700W products for game players. Chou stresses that his company has watch closely the features of the latest graphics chips developed by nVidea and ATI as well as the features of the latest microprocessors introduced by AMD and Intel so that it can keep up with their paces.

"If we did not revise our product strategy, we would have to compete with suppliers in the crowded standard market," Chou says. Today, his company's supplies have been recognized top-quality products in Europe, Japan and the United States. In Europe, Germany's PC Games Hardware magazine ranked Topower's TOP-420P4 and TSP-350P4 supplies as the best products in their category in its Sept. 2003 issue. In its January 2004 issue Japan's WIN PC magazine recognized the company's TOP-370XP as the most efficient supply unit among 17 surveyed products evaluated, and its TOP-400P5 the third best in terms of minimal noise.

Over the past few years, the company has added several patented designs to its supplies. In its P5 and P6 families of supplies, the company adds a design that turns on fans only when computer users are playing video games, which usually consume quite a lot of electricity. "Even when they turn on fans, you can hardly hear the noise," Chou stresses. The "enhanced cooling after system off" (ECASO) technology that has been incorporated is another plus, provides three more minutes of power to keep fans working after the system is shut off in order to lower internal temperature.

The company's Green Power supplies are installed with an AC control circuit to automatically shut off the power relay powering computer peripherals connected to it when computer power is shut off. When the power is turned on, the supply wakes up the relay, which then turns on all peripherals. Inside the supplies there is a high power-factor correction device which allows the supplies' PFC rates to be higher than 99%. Such products as the Green Power now accounted for 84.58% of the company's 2003 sales.

Topower also put innovative designs on appearance of its power supplies. Some of them present wooden-grain looks, some of them come with famous cartoon figures like the Spider Man, and some of them have silver and dark-blue looks that deliver science feeling.

The company has earned a total of 28 patents on its innovative designs. Innovations kept the company's compound annual growth rate at 47% between 1999 and 2003, higher than the company's 30% expectation in 2000. "We expect the pace to maintain at the rate this year," Chou says. In July, the company revised upward its earning forecast for this year by 50% considering that earnings in the first seven months attained 80% of its original goal. The company projects its revenue to reach NT$560 million (US$16.5 million at US$1:NT$34) throughout this year, compared with last year's NT$464 million (US$13.6 million), and earnings for this year to rise 29.9% from last year.

The company ships over 99% of its products overseas, to brand names such as Tagan, Bequiet, and Topower. (Sept. 2004)