Noting the success of its newly launched products, including the Asterion AC and DC programmable power lines and the Sequoia and Tahoe series of programmable power sources, AMETEK Programmable Power has recently made an end-of-life (EOL) announcement for some of its legacy product lines.
Its line of low-power DC products, the company said on its programmable power blog, have reached a point of obsolescence and are being phased out. The company has plotted out a one-year transition as a way of helping customers manage the changeover, with product phaseouts occurring in stages.
“Legacy products require components that are increasingly more difficult to source,” the blog explained. “There is a limited capability to add features to these legacy products when new designs can accommodate these new features more quickly and easily. Our goal with the latest product development is to replace these legacy products with a new line that limits the risk to customers in terms of form, fit, and function. As another objective, we streamlined the number of unique parts utilized in the Asterion design to create a more manageable lead time while offering the most significant degree of flexibility.”
Electronics360 first reported on the Asterion DC line in early 2020; AMETEK now refers to it as a flagship product offering higher power density in a more compact form, greater product and programming flexibility as well as lower selection complexity, along with backward compatibility to the company’s legacy product lines.
According to the company, Asterion offers power ratings of 1.7, 3.4, 5.0 kW housed in a 1U chassis, plus a 10 kW solution housed in a 2U chassis. Designed as an economical option for traditional rectangular wave output power supplies, the DC Series provides nine different output options up to 600 V.
There is also the compact Asterion DC ASA, which Electronics360 reported on in late 2021 as the “next evolution in programmable power space.” It brings three independent, isolated 600 W channels into a 1U chassis for a total power density of 1,800 W. The newest addition to the Asterion platform, the Asterion DC ASM, bumps those channels to 1,700 W each, for a total power density of 5,100 W.
In the EOL announcement, the company also said that it invites discussions with customers unable to upgrade within a 12 month timeframe. A new AMETEK white paper offers more information on ensuring smooth EOL transitions.
