Enhancing affordability of power electronic subsystems-a success story

The life cycle cost of power electronic subsystems has been escalated by the lack of a common unifying approach to address their performance and their associated system effectiveness on the host applications. This deficiency is most profound with the use of commercial items where the operational integrity of the subsystems is paramount. Consequently, four years ago the Electronic Power Specification Standardization (EPSS) program was formed as a government-industry partnership to develop standards to foster a common unifying approach. The EPSS partnership has already developed and published one IEEE standard and work is well under way on the second.