Quality - The Elpac Difference
At Elpac Power Supplies, our 5-year warranty is the longest in the industry and has been honed by over 40 years of engineering and production experience. Elpac quality is comprised of five essential ingredients: design, vendor selection, manufacturing, testing, and system.
Design
Quality begins in the development phase where we employ conservative electrical and mechanical design rules to achieve optimum reliability. Our electrical designs provide specified performance at the extremes of line voltage, minimum and maximum current draw by a customer’s load, temperature extremes, and applicable Regulatory Agency requirements. This is accomplished by employing conservative safety margins for power dissipation, voltage ratings, current limits, and physical spacing. The end result is a design that assures specified operational performance and high reliability for the life of the product.
Vendor Selection
All Elpac vendors are selected based upon quality. For example, we use only high-quality Japanese-supplied electrolytic capacitors for the prime power supply functions. Elpac does not believe that other available capacitors meet the rigid standards we use for all of our component selections. When you want the very best, you have to start with superior quality components.
Manufacturing
The manufacturing element of quality includes functional documentation of all required manufacturing processes and execution by highly trained assemblers and inspection personnel. All Elpac power supply designs are meticulously documented for the manufacturing process, and pilot production runs verify both the documentation and the finished product. Following successful pilot production, final assembly instructions are approved and volume manufacturing is initiated.
Testing
The testing aspect of our quality program occurs after manufacture, when all Elpac power supplies receive two-to-eight hour burn-in plus at least one full ATE acceptance test. During ATE test, all power supplies are monitored with electrical load under vibration to assure that reliability is built in. The outputs are continuously monitored with drop out meters. As a separate requirement, Elpac subjects all power supplies to a demonstrated MTBF program where we run units under higher-than-normal-temperature ranges and stress them with severe on/off cycling and extended full load/high temperature runs. This reliability testing, conducted at our Irvine facility, is maintained until each product series has achieved a minimum demonstrated MTBF of at least 100,000 hours (typical MTBF is in excess of 500,000 hours).
System
And finally the system aspect of quality refers to Elpac’s ISO 9001:2000 certification and the quality organization that supports it. Elpac first received ISO 9001 accreditation in 1994. During 2002, this certification was upgraded to the 2000 standard.