RECOM’s Cost Efficient New SMT Factory

For this new facility, RECOM has invested 3 million US Dollars so far, and still has space for further expansion. On a floor space of 1500m², RECOM plans to manufacture 15 million converters this year, increasing by 40% to 50% in the following year.

Rising certification costs have increased the demand for pre-built modules, but for large volume projects, the higher cost of a commercially available converter has proven less attractive than a discrete solution. To counter this issue, RECOM has selected the most popular high runners to be manufacturing in lots of 100k pieces. These efficiently manufactured “E version” modules benefit from the economies of scale from mass production and so will be 25% to 30% cheaper than standard models, but nevertheless still subjected to the same rigid quality assurance process as the conventionally manufactured converters.

The ultimate goal of this new factory is the 100% automatically manufactured converter. So far, the difficulty of winding toroidal transformers with very small diameters has prevented this. In cooperation with an external machine tool manufacturer, RECOM engineers have succeeded in developing a special machine to overcome this problem. Now even coils with an internal diameter as small as 2.5mm can be fully automatically wound, and this 5 to 10 times faster than hitherto possible with a guaranteed stable reliability.