Electronic Products & Technology

Murata Power Solutions expands footprint in Canada

Stephen Law   

Power Supply / Management Engineering Supply Chain power supply

In a bold move, Murata Power Solutions Inc. has doubled its footprint on Canadian soil, expanding its engineering team and production capabilities to better serve its expanding and diverse customer base. The Mansfield MA-based manufacturer of dc-dc converters, ac-dc power supplies marked the grand opening of its office expansion in Markham ON, with a special event recently.

Murata Power Solutions president and CEO Stephen Pimpis (3rd from right) leads the ribbon cutting ceremony at the firm’s expanded Markham ON facility.

Murata Power Solutions president and CEO Stephen Pimpis (3rd from right) leads the ribbon cutting ceremony at the firm’s expanded Markham ON facility.

Attended by customers, suppliers, city officials, plus sales representatives and executives from head office Murata Power Solutions unveiled its 35,000-square-foot design centre, which employs 56 people, mostly in an engineering capacity, says president and CEO Stephen Pimpis.

“We have managed to rapidly expand our customer base, as well as add more tier one customers through the expansion of this facility,” says Pimpis. “This has driven our need to grow our engineering teams and product development areas. We are on a very good growth trajectory.”

Murata Power Solutions is a subsidiary of Murata Manufacturing Corp., a global company with approximately $10-billion yearly revenue and over 50,000 employees worldwide. The firm designs and manufactures a broad offering of standard products and market leading custom solutions, focusing primarily on the computing, communications, industrial and medical markets.

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Murata Executives

From left are: Alex Yang, director, product development; Stephen Pimpis, president & CEO; Carlos Bustos, vice-president, product marketing, all of Murata Power Solutions.

The Markham facility will also assume some of Murata’s corporate functions, including a quality engineering component to operations. “This is intended to speed our response time to the customer,” Pimpis says. The firm will continue adding to its engineering team in Markham over the course of the next few years, says Pimpis, noting that these roles are quite diverse – representing a vast array of job roles including printed circuit board layout, documentation control, design engineers and qualification engineers. As the firm brings in more custom and industry standard designs, the Markham facility will continue to add test and validation equipment further enhancing its product development capabilities.

“More space provides us the opportunity to set up more work benches and lab benches,” Pimpis says. “As we get more and more of these type of designs and they progress further along in the development process, we will need to also add ovens and environmental chambers to burn-in and test over different temperature ranges.”

Pimpis says the design team has found success in pursuing applications that are driven by smartphones, tablets, wireless type data, which is spurring growth within the data centre market, which relates to networking, security, storage and power shelves for server racks.

“For a lot of our customers – the main focus is the data centre, networking datacom driven,” Pimpis says. “The growth of IoT (Internet of Things) drives the need for more networking, security, storage – all of that stuff that resides in a data centre or somewhere else.”

As a rule, data centres are constantly seeking ways to reduce electricity consumption as one of its primary costs – thus power density and efficiency are key concerns. Murata Power Solutions is focused on the customers’ demands for efficiency – with power supply efficiency rates almost consistently around 96% now, according to Pimpis.

Murata's team based out of the newly expanded Markham facility.

Murata’s team based out of the newly expanded Markham facility.

“Customers want us to continually push more power out of a smaller box. Improving efficiency is the value we provide to our customer. Our focus is to be a leader in efficiency and power density, to be a green power supply vendor,” he concludes.

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