Mr. Budano: Elgar is comprised of three brand names: Elgar, Sorensen and Power Ten. Elgar was founded in 1965 as an AC power source company. Sorensen was founded in 1946 as a DC programmable power supply company. Elgar acquired Sorensen in 1994. Power Ten was a Bay Area startup producing high-power DC supplies, targeting the semiconductor industry for the burn in and ion implantation markets. That company was founded in 1992 and was acquired by Elgar in 1998. Today, all of the operations have been consolidated in San Diego and all three of those brands operate under one roof under Elgar Holdings.
TWST: Looking at the two older businesses ' the AC and DC power supplies
' who are the customers for those?
Mr. Budano: Elgar serves a very wide range of customers. The principal
applications, we make quasi-test and measurement equipment. For example,
if you're trying to determine if your product is going to work in an R&D
lab, and if it runs on 12-volt DC power, you'd want to know if it's
going to work at 12.5 and 11.5 volts and if there are any disturbances
on the power line, you want to know if your product is going to work. So
it's in R&D applications. Then, when you manufacture the product, you're
also going to want to know that every product you make still meets the
same specifications. So you'll test it under various simulated power
conditions. After manufacturing, a lot of companies will burn in their
products as in the semiconductor industry or the automotive industry, so
we'll power 500 Pentium processors in an oven, for example, and
determine if they operate properly at different voltage ranges. So
that's burn in. Finally, there's a wide range of process control
applications, including plating or sputtering applications for plating
metal or sputtering, making CDs or DVDs, or it could be rolling steel or
annealing semiconductors ' anything where the power supply voltage or
current is driving a characteristic of a process, like a heater or a
roller or a plating process. Our customers could be semiconductor,
automotive or aviation ' where there's a big market for us on the AC
side, especially. It could be the plating industry. We also have a
substantial defense presence, mainly in testing avionics that come off
of aircraft and off shipboard equipment, and also testing field
equipment ' any electronics that would be on a Humvee or would be on a
tank or ship or airplane.
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