Seasonic's Engineering and Factory Tour

As each stage of components were added, the process of quality checking gets more and more general – with the early stages testing individual or small groups of hardware, and later as things progressed the testing evolves into an overall product check.



Hand touch ups are always a necessary evil, with a few failed units sitting on the pallet behind. It was explained that failed parts are unavoidable, and having none is a sign of a bigger control problem on the line.

Burning In

After all the general assembly is complete, the product goes for burn in testing. Seasonic has made its own individual loaders and rack on wheels to haul 30 power supplies at a time into heated rooms. Each PSU is subjected to an hour in one of these heat chambers at 50'C – the first 15 minutes of which are a constant on-off power cycle to give maximum stress to the hardware.

The PSUs are turned on, the temperature is allowed to raise to 50'C, then they are shut off and fans kick in to lower the temperature to 40'C, before the power comes back on again. After 15 minutes the power is kept on and the temperature maintained at a constant 50'C for the remaining 45 minutes.

That’s certainly hardcore.

But if that’s not enough, the ones run at the end of the day are left loaded overnight for an ultimate burn in.



The first five chambers are 110V; with one set slightly lower specifically for the Japanese market to test they are capable of avoiding a brownout, while the rest are 230V. Seasonic also said that because it works on an evolutionary model, new hardware undergoes a continuing process of constant long term evaluation: with a few pieces loaded constantly for very long periods, such as a few-several months at a time to see what effect this has.

In the first factory the burn-in rooms are large enough to get three burn-in machines at any one time, and I can tell you having been in one of these 50'C rooms of quite high humidity it’s not somewhere I’d want to spend much time! In the second factory things are a little different, with smaller areas dedicated to each loading rack in a larger (but still hotter than normal) room.