Bringing Custom Power Supplies to Bear

Steve Melito: Hey everybody, welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now, the podcast that’s powered by FuzeHub. I’m your host, Steve Melito. Today we’re talking to Michael Allen, the President and co-owner of Z-Axis in Phelps, New York. Z-axis provides electronic design and manufacturing all under one roof a rare combination. Michael has been on the podcast before to talk about Z-Axis, but he’s here today to tell us about a business unit of Z-Axis called Bear Power Supplies. Michael, welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now.

Michael Allen: Well, thank you for having me.

Steve Melito: It’s a pleasure, and before we begin, we’re going to talk about bear. But I’ve got to talk about birds for just a moment. I’ve got some chickens here in my home office and so, for our listeners, if you hear some bird noises, that’s not an error on your end. It’s just where things are at today. But, Michael, tell us the story of bear First of all. I’ve always loved the name. I’ve never seen any bears in the woods, though working on electronics. But why did you start Bayer? When did you do it? How does this business division fit into the big picture of what Z-Axis would like to achieve?

Michael Allen: Well, 25 years ago, z-axis was sort of in decline in its original business and we decided to get into power supplies and the idea was we had a lot of experience in power supplies, so why not, you know, go into the power supply business. And so we literally created Bear Power Supplies. You know, myself and a bunch of other people sat around the room and said we need a, we need a name. Zxs isn’t a good name for a power supply, there’s no picture. So, you know, we came up with a with the name of Bear Power Supplies. You know I had some very fundamental rules that had to have beginning of the alphabet, you know, first four or five letters preferably, and had to have a picture. And it’s worked out well. I mean, the number one Google search that finds Bear Power Supplies is literally Bear Power Supplies. They recognize our logo and my wife drew the logo. You know it’s a black bear and that’s what’s indigenous in our area in upstate New York. And so that’s how we started and it’s great and it’s a lot more creative than A1 and some of these other things I see people do to try to get to the top of the heap. So some of our listeners know what a power supply is, but other folks, like myself, couldn’t exactly sit down and design one.

Steve Melito: What is a power supply, Michael, and how does it work?

Michael Allen: So power supplies range is enormous, but you know the classic power supply people think about is you know your computer may need 5 volts or 12 volts or 3.3 volts to run, but what’s coming out of the wall is 120 volts AC or, in Europe, 240 volts AC, and so what you have to do is get from that high voltage AC down to a low voltage for your electronic circuitry to run, and so the power supply is a device that does that.

Steve Melito: I see. So if you have an incorrect power supply, I’m thinking that could be a pretty bad thing.

Michael Allen: Wrong voltage power supply could be a really bad thing, absolutely.

Steve Melito: Okay, good. So a few months ago you wrote an article for Electronic Design called what is a Rugged Power Supply, and I’ll share that link in the show notes later, but for our listeners today, what makes a power supply rugged?

Michael Allen: Well, it can mean a lot of things. You know, some of our rugged power supplies, you know, have to work over wide temperature range. You know we’ve done power supplies that have to work on the tundra, you know, minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius. Sometimes they have to be able to withstand a lot of vibration. Certainly, you know, the classic, worst case one is one on a helicopter that constant thumping can shake parts loose. So a lot of our power supplies are encapsulated so that if you drop them on the floor they don’t get hurt. So they’re filled with epoxy to make them rugged. So I’ve given you a temperature. I’ve given you, you know, mechanical ruggedness. Another reason that they may be rugged is if they’re, you know, out on a pole powering a security camera, you know that pole might get hit by lightning. So having a degree of protection against lightning would certainly add ruggedness. So that’s some of the different ways that power supplies can be rugged.

Steve Melito: Is EMI shielding part of what makes something rugged, or is that just standard?

Michael Allen: No, that’s pretty standard. You know, EMI shielding or EMI filters on systems aren’t really part of rugged. It’s just to meet the you know, the FCC requirements so that you’re not jamming people’s radios, etc.

Steve Melito: Right, and are there special cooling issues with power supplies? I was on a call yesterday with a manufacturer. They were telling me about making louvers to help cooling on power supplies and I hadn’t really thought about that. But do the power supplies you make have ways for air to flow?

Michael Allen: Yeah, every power supply is not 100% efficient. So if you are producing a power supply that’s putting out 750 watts, it may be bringing in 800 watts and that other 50 watts has to be dissipated as heat. That’s where it goes, and so you got to get rid of that 750 watt power supply. You got to get rid of 50 watts of heat, and there are multiple ways of doing that. The cheapest and classic way is put a fan on it, and that’s why everybody’s PC has a fan. It’s the cheapest and fastest way to get rid of the heat is you just blow some cool air across the circuitry and you can get rid of that heat. That does not make it rugged, though. You know fans fail. They suck in dirt, and you know so. A lot of our power supplies, even up to a we’re doing one that’s a 13 kilowatts. It has no fan. So you have to be very careful with your cooling. You know lots of big heat sinks, lots of chimney type effects to encourage just convection to take air across it. But you know there are all sorts of different ways of cooling. You know we even make some power supplies that are submerged, so they’re underwater. The ocean is a great coolant water is a very good coolant.

Steve Melito: Right. So you’ve mentioned some cases where I can see that you’d need a custom power supply, but they seem extreme. Are there lots of times when somebody needs a custom power supply, and the reason I’m asking this is there are lots of places to buy a standard power supply, including online, but bare strength seems to be really custom power supplies.

Michael Allen: Virtually 99% of the power supplies we produce are custom For your average application. 99.9% of the time you can use a standard power supply. You know every PC has a standard power supply in it. You know it’s a commodity item that’s made offshore. You know a lot of times people can just use standard power supplies, but there’s a lot of times that you can’t. There is nothing available off the shelf that’ll meet your requirements. You know we have people’s requirements that you know I must be able to drop this power supply. It’s used on a medical device and it may get dropped on the floor and if it does I want to keep my patient alive. So you may be a requirement that it can be dropped on the floor four or 500 times and still work. Well, there isn’t a single off-the-shelf power supply that can do that. So that’s an example of why you might want a custom power supply. You know we’re sort of a leader in the industry on low leakage power supplies. That’s something that’s pretty much only important for medical and you know the closer you get to somebody’s heart, the lower the leakage current is allowed. You know if the power supply is across the room from the patient then you know you can have pretty high leakage and if it’s in their vicinity, where they can touch it, you have to have lower leakage. And if, as soon as it gets internal part of the circuitry gets internal to their body, then your leakage current must be much smaller so that you don’t cause harm to the patient. So we make a lot of instruments that are powering infusion pumps, and salt water is conductive, so that’s inside the body when low leakage is important.

We also make power supplies that will power cameras that are used during surgery and by definition are internal to the patient. So again, low leakage is important and we make power supplies for different heart instruments where the instrument itself may be inside the body, and you know we have to have, you know, low leakage power supplies for that. So we really are a leader in low leakage power supplies. And there are very few CF low leakage power supplies available in the market. They just don’t exist. You know it’s pretty much forced into custom.

Steve Melito: So I’m glad you mentioned medical power supplies. I wanted to ask about that when you work with designers and you mentioned low leakage current what are some other things designers need to consider with a medical power supply? Things like proximity to the patient, I think you mentioned as well. Is there anything besides low leakage current that really is critical?

Michael Allen: Yeah, there are some requirements that if you’re connected to a patient, not only do you have to have low leakage so you don’t cause their heart to defibrillate, but if for some reason in the middle of a procedure they start having where they need to be hit with the paddles, you have to have very low capacitance to your power supply back to earth. And the reason for that is when they hit with the paddles they want the current just to go between those paddles. They don’t want you to start kicking the surgeon or something because you got some current going through the knee. So capacitance is very important and it’s really a system capacitance. So it’s not just the power supply capacitance, it’s the capacitance of the power supply plus the capacitance of the device, the instrument that my customer is producing. So we work together to decide you know a capacitance budget, how much can he have and how much can I have, and that’s very critical. And sometimes our power supplies have to have very low capacitance. I mean we have one power supply for medical application that has to be less than five picofarads of capacitance between the input and the output, which is extremely low.

Steve Melito: So Bayer is known for its expertise in medical power supplies, certainly as a custom power supply manufacturer. Are there other markets that Bayer is really looking at? I know industrial is a focus, but are there more specific parts of that industrial marketplace perhaps?

Michael Allen: Yeah, there’s a lot of industrial applications that a custom power supply might be needed. Examples are anything used in the railroad industry, you know. I mean there are circuitries in the railroad industry that are literally still working. You know relay circuits that have been in service for over 100 years, and so you know normal power supplies will have a practical life of between five and 10 years. Well, that’s completely unacceptable if you’re monitoring train traffic or control or those type of things. So for those type of things you have to use a different type of power supply or components in power supply that are much more rugged, have a much longer life, and you know that’s not available to an off-the-shelf power supply. So certainly anything in the transportation industry often requires a custom power supply and we have a lot of expertise in that.

Steve Melito: Sure, how about the aerospace industry? Is that also an area that you’re looking at?

Michael Allen: It is most of the time that’s done by very large companies, so it’s not usually the type of thing that they’re looking for smaller companies to produce. They’re going to use thousands of them and it’s a derivation on the theme of what they’ve already had. And you know, frankly, I’d rather never make the news that there’s smoke on a plane and it was caused by a fault in our power supply. So I don’t go after commercial aviation at all or military aviation. We don’t design power supplies for either of those applications.

Steve Melito: Got it. Let’s talk about Bayer Power Supplies as a business unit a little bit. So when you get an order for Bayer Power Supplies, does that customer get access to all of the expertise within Z-Axis? And you’ve made a lot of equipment investments, you’ve got a lot of engineering talent. How does that work?

Michael Allen: Yeah, so my engineering department is and the whole company is really completely integrated between Z-Axis and Bayer. So when you order a Bayer power supply it is being manufactured on the same equipment, the same one of my three surface mount lines that are placing all the parts for Z-Axis contract manufacturing and because we do, you know two thirds of the business is contract manufacturing, one third is custom power supplies. You know we get the luxury in the power supply business to have high volume equipment that you wouldn’t be able to justify for the size of Bear, and so you know we get to use high volume, fast equipment to produce our power supplies, all done right here in upstate New York.

Steve Melito: That’s right and we’ve talked about this before, but I believe you’re one of the largest users of Micronic equipment on the East Coast. Micronic is a PCB Equipment Manufacturer.

Michael Allen: Yes, we have a total of 11 pieces of equipment from Micronic, so with two more on order, you know, we have their stencil printers, we have six of their pick-and-place machines and we have four of their storage towers. Wow, and certainly you know there may be some people out there that have more equipment, but our pick-and-place machines are either the latest generation that were introduced a year ago or the second to the last generation that was issued before that, so it’s very modern equipment.

Steve Melito: And all this happening in upstate New York. You’re not too far from Rochester, out in Phelps.

Michael Allen: Yep, halfway between Rochester and Syracuse,

Steve Melito: Okay good, and how many employees do you have?

Michael Allen: About 95 today.

Steve Melito: I have a feeling you’ll be hitting that 100 mark sometime.

Michael Allen: You know I have a goal to keep below 100. It works well for our facility. You know we work with one shift by design. Every time we can’t keep up with one shift then we buy more equipment so we can. That’s how we got the six-foot-in-place machines but can place machines. And you know one shift doesn’t have the headaches of night supervisors and trying to hire engineering and it’s the other shift’s fault and I have only one shift that solves a lot of problems and makes it a great place to work.

Steve Melito: Absolutely.

Michael Allen: You know, with one shift, 95 people. We have a 32,000 square foot building and 95 people work well in that. You know, the bathrooms work well, the parking lot works well, the microwaves work well, so it’s a good sizing. So if we start getting approaching 100, I will probably figure out if there’s some low-value products that we can outsource so that I can keep us at this level, right right, and when we talked previously on a podcast, we had discussed how Z-Axis works with everyone from startups to very large manufacturers.

Steve Melito: Is that true on the bare power supply side as well?

Michael Allen: Yeah, we certainly deal with some products Companies that are just coming out with their first product on the bare power supply and two very large companies. I mean we have seven or eight different companies that we sell a custom power supply to that sell over a billion dollars a year. So you know we have a lot of large companies that are our customers.

Steve Melito: Excellent. So last question for you, Michael if somebody wants to get in touch with you about Bayer Power Supplies, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Michael Allen: We have a contact form on our website that we really do take care of. It’s not like one of these ones. We check it once a week and certainly people can always reach out to me or my sales department. You know sales at bear, b-e-a-r, p-w-r.com. It would certainly get back to people very quickly.

Steve Melito” Fantastic. Michael Allen, thank you so much for being on New York State Manufacturing Now, thank you. So we’ve been talking to Michael Allen of Z-Axis and Bear Power Supplies in Phelps, new York, and if you’d like to hear more from Michael, I hope you’ll consider joining FuzeHub for how Manufacturers Succeed at Marketing an upcoming virtual event that’s scheduled for May 14th from 12 to 1 pm. Michael will be one of our panelists and one of the things you’ll learn is how Z-Axis built a YouTube channel with over 100 videos and 6,000 subscribers. That’s right, 6,000 subscribers. To join us for this you’ll need to register, so go right now to FuzeHub.com, slash infuse-marketing-meetups, and if you didn’t get that URL, don’t worry, just email FuzeHub at [email protected] and we’ll get you set up. So, on behalf of FuzeHub at New York State Manufacturing now, this is Steve Melito signing off.