News

European Concern Expands over IPC-9592 "Guide"

June 05, 2007 by Jeff Shepard

The European Power Supplies Manufacturers Association (EPSMA) has expanded on its previous open letter to IPC to express its grave concerns over the IPC’s draft document IPC9592 ‘Performance Parameters for Power Conversion Devices.’

As originally reported in an exclusive PowerPulse.net article on June 1, the EPSMA has cast doubt on the approach taken in the IPC9592 document, which has been drafted without consultation with the main power supply industry players worldwide. The latest communication from EPSMA provides additional details of its concerns.

Lars Thorsell, who chairs the EPSMA’s Technical Committee, commented: "A guideline of this type is useful but the document should look very different. At the moment it feels like a standard. The documentation required by IPC9592 is excessive, and makes it impossible to protect suppliers’ confidential information. Furthermore the extensive testing specified would significantly increase cost and time-to-market, which runs completely counter to market demands."

In its letter to IPC, the EPSMA highlighted a number of concerns. The IPC draft is considered too broad, attempting to address too many products and applications. In addition, the document is overly prescriptive in its attempts to secure quality and does not leverage existing standards from JEDEC, IEC, IEEE and ISO.

Bernhard Erdl, Chairman of the EPSMA added: "The EPSMA and the PSMA have already supported the High Density Packaging User Group (HDPUG) which represents a large number of companies from the communication and system integrator industries. It has done a lot of work in producing guidelines for board-mounted power supplies (BMPS) over the last two years, working closely with the user community. This work has resulted in a comprehensive document of nearly 150 pages, aimed at a mature and bilateral understanding between users and manufacturers of such products. The BMPS Applications Guidelines was published and released by HDPUG in late March this year."

The EPSMA again stated it would be happy to share its expertise with IPC, as it did previously with its collaborative work with HDPUG. It proposes to work closely with IPC to develop a document with collective input from both users and manufacturers.