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Innovating Faster for Customer Success

Posted November 07, 2024 by Peter Gillespie

Advanced Energy Accelerates Product Development Cycles to Win

AE's modular design speeds up product development, delivering innovative solutions faster.
AE launches more medical and industrial power products faster, tailored to diverse needs.
With cross-portfolio technologies, AE delivers leap-frog platforms for precision power needs.

Advanced Energy has long been a pioneer in precision power for the most demanding applications in semiconductor manufacturing, industrial equipment, medical instruments, and data center computing and communications. Our customers rely on us to deliver high-performance, reliable standard and customized products that meet their exact needs and specifications. Often Advanced Energy’s power solutions are critical to our customers in shrinking their time-to-market and maximizing competitive advantage.

However, the rapid progression of technology and intensifying competitive pressures are only further cutting into the time from concept to commercial product. That’s why, emerging from the pandemic, Advanced Energy very intentionally accelerated our product development cycles to be at the forefront with innovative solutions – whether it’s semiconductor fabrication or stringent safety standards for medical equipment – and maintain both our customer loyalty and competitive edge.

Strategy is delivering

In medical power we doubled new product introductions (NPIs) in two years, while our industrial teams launched 102 new and modified standard products in 2023, up from 68 in 2022. What’s more, we are on track for a further nearly 20% year-on-year NPI increase for industrial products in 2024.

Similar trends can be seen when it comes to our technologies for hyperscale and enterprise applications. Here we have significantly reduced the time between NPIs, ensuring we stay ahead of the curve in the exponentially growing demand for efficient delivery of data center power.

NPIs advance technology with leapfrog innovations

Our latest RF generator (eVerest), impedance matching network (NavX) and revolutionary plasma bias technology (eVoS), for example, are transforming precision plasma power control for semiconductor manufacturers as they drive into the Angstrom Era of sub-2 nm nodes with 3D device architecture. These are new and novel generational power platforms that are pushing the state-of-the-art for etch and deposition processes. We've also launched intelligent, fully water-cooled DC power supplies for precise control of film quality in thin film deposition.

For industrial power applications, we introduced the NeoPower™ family with configurable power supplies that offer up to 4,000 W and four times the power density of conventional products, delivering optimized, application-specific power conversion in a small form factor. We also launched the Evergreen™ family of rack-based, high-power modular AC-DC products with 2.5x higher output power than our previous generation of solutions with higher efficiency and density.

Fig. 1. Advanced Energy’s growing product portfolio with dramatic increase in NPIs

For medical customers we announced all-in-one, intelligent system power and capacitor charger platforms that simplify and speed design of medical laser systems and electrosurgery applications. We also launched the world’s first off-the-shelf convection cooled CF-rated standard medical power supplies, the NCF150 series. This new product helps medical OEMs reduce the system level components required for isolation, minimize overall system size and cost, and speed time-to-market.

We expanded our lighting power and control portfolio with LumaDrive™, a new pre-wired, high-efficiency remote centralized drivers for large-scale horticultural, greenhouse and industrial LED lighting applications and unveiled new smart monitoring and digital control capabilities for AC-DC high-power supplies. The new LED lighting approach benefits horticulture, parking garages, warehouses, and industrial facilities by reducing complexity, simplifying installation, enhancing productivity and reducing costs.

Fueling NPI acceleration

Fundamental to Advanced Energy’s strategy has been the adoption of a disciplined approach to hardware and software modularity. This enables us to re-use and re-combine existing best-in-class modules and functionalities and create new products much faster and much more efficiently.

Just as importantly, we have focused on connecting our engineers, technologists and critical problem solvers directly with our customers to better understand their expectations, pain points and roadmaps. Our customer-centric focus has helped us to deliver a variety of value-added solutions that are optimized for new and emerging applications, to advance state-of-the-art in highly engineered, precision power conversion and control technologies, and to exceed customer expectations.

We are committed to solving our customers’ most difficult power design and integration challenges by becoming faster, offering more capabilities and improving our product solutions to help them get to market faster with their products.

Fig. 2. Airity Technologies is the latest acquisition focused on accelerating innovation

To help our customers get to market faster with new products requires our continual evaluation of in-house capabilities and environmental surveillance to identify when there may be a need for additional technologies and expertise. This is why we recently acquired Airity Technologies, a provider of next-generation, high-voltage power conversion products and technologies for applications in semiconductor, industrial and medical markets. Airity brings a portfolio of gallium nitride (GaN) based high frequency, power conversion and pulsing technologies that enable a step function improvement in power density and response time, allowing us to enhance our capabilities and offer more solutions for complex customer needs across a broader range of applications.

We’re only getting faster

Speeding up innovation and product development requires coordinated efforts across the company as we seek to speed each stage of the design-to-production process.

Our Operations team is also on a journey to be best-in-class in execution and more responsive to customer needs. Highly responsive NPI teams work closely with engineering and product development to ensure smooth and timely transitions from design to production.

We’ve invested in advanced digital tools and platforms that enhance collaboration, workflows, communication and visibility both internally as well as across our entire value chain.

We continue to optimize our global factory network to enhance quality, reduce lead times, and build resilience. This makes us better equipped to handle sudden changes, even after post-pandemic supply chain disruptions.

The results of this strategic approach to accelerated innovation speak for themselves. Advanced Energy, long a technology leader, is deepening our reputation for rapid new product and derivative product introductions. Our barometer for success is enabling our customers to win in their markets with Advanced Energy products. Keeping a focus on our customers’ success, we have seen increased customer satisfaction (scorecards, awards, direct feedback) and have also gained new customers and market share in our target sectors.

We are proud of our progress to get faster and the transformation we have made across our business to support high-speed, focused product development. This transformation means that, after more than 40 years, we remain at the forefront of technology and are launching more new precision power products that enable our customers to innovate and succeed.

Peter Gillespie

Advanced Energy

Peter Gillespie joined Advanced Energy in January 2019 and now serves as senior vice president of strategic and corporate marketing. This is his second tenure at the company. Gillespie has held various leadership roles at Advanced Energy including senior vice president of semiconductor and computing products, vice president and general manager of semiconductor products, as well as vice president of global sales. Between positions at Advanced Energy, Gillespie was chief marketing officer at SEMI, the global industry association representing the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain. Prior to his first tenure at Advanced Energy, Gillespie was president of Tevet Process Control Technologies (acquired by Onto Innovation) and held leadership positions at KLA, Boxer Cross (acquired by Applied Materials), Fusion Semiconductor (now Axcelis), and Intertek. Gillespie serves on SEMI’s Board of Industry Leaders and on California Polytechnic (Cal Poly) State University College of Engineering Advisory Board. He holds a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Cal Poly State University – San Luis Obispo and has completed post-graduate courses in marketing, innovation, and finance at Stanford University.