News

Cooperation and Progress on IPC-9592

July 01, 2007 by Jeff Shepard

Members of the IPC’s Power Conversion Subcommittee, leading power supply associations and power supply manufacturers from around the world converged on Schaumburg, Illinois, June 26-27, to discuss the draft of IPC-9592, newly titled, "Requirements for Power Conversion Devices for the Computing and Telecommunications Industries," and make plans for its continuing development and publication.

The companies that comprise the proposed standard’s originating subcommittee (of the IPC OEM Critical Components Council Steering Committee) – Dell, IBM, Lenovo, Hewlett Packard, Cisco Systems, Alcatel Lucent and Apple – organized the meeting. Representatives from the European Power Supply Manufacturers Association (EPSMA), the Power Sources Manufacturers Association (PSMA) and the Distributed-power Open Standards Alliance (DOSA) joined in the discussion, along with individuals from Astec/Artesyn (U.S.), Astec Power (Philippines), Astrodyne (U.S.), C&D Technologies (U.S.), Lite-on (U.S.), Lite-on Technology (Taiwan), and Tyco Electronics Power Systems (U.S.).

Although the meeting was preceded by some concern from associations representing power suppliers, those points were addressed and the organizations (as well as other companies in attendance) have agreed to serve on the IPC-9592 subcommittee. PSMA is one of the organizations reaching out to its members to take an active role.

"We encourage our membership to join the Power Conversion Devices Standard Subcommittee and its work on developing IPC-9592," said Chavonne Yee, President of PSMA. "The participation of power supply providers, along with academia, component providers and others influencing the industry, is integral to this very important initiative."

Scott Strand, Ph.D., Senior Technical Staff Member, Integrated Technology Delivery Quality, IBM, and Chairman of the IPC-9592 subcommittee said, "I am extremely satisfied with the results of the meeting. There was a tremendous amount of cooperation and this combined team will continue working to create a very useful document for the entire industry. "

In order to continue the momentum spurred by the meeting and given the breadth of topics covered in the nearly 100-page proposal, the growing subcommittee membership elected to hone the document in sections. Small working groups will address focused sections of the document: design for reliability, design development and qualification testing, manufacturing quality processes and manufacturing conformance testing, and report their edits back to the whole subcommittee by late summer. A revised draft of IPC-9592 is expected to be released for industry comment in the fall.

"Since the next draft is scheduled to be sent out for review by August 10, there is only a matter of days to join the committee and get involved with the development of the revised draft," stated Artesyn’s Bob White who was present during the meeting.

Although the work of the IPC-9592 subcommittee is underway, additional participants from the power supply industry, as well as OEMs are welcome to join. Interested parties should contact Tom Newton at [email protected] or 847-597-2849 by August 10, 2007.