It’s been an incredibly exciting year to lead the Precision Devices division and support our talented employees as they innovate on and push the boundaries of the specialty components these markets require.
Among the biggest and most exciting changes this past year was Knowles Corporation’s acquisition of Cornell Dubilier (CDE). This acquisition adds CDE’s broad range of high-quality film, electrolytic, and mica capacitors to our extensive range of ceramic and thin film components and adds some incredibly talented employees to our team. This further expands both our off-the-shelf and custom capacitor offerings that can support the world’s most demanding applications.
Our diversified solutions portfolio will help customers continue to push the capacitance and voltage boundaries of their power electronics applications and significantly expands our distribution partnerships. This means we have more product availability in more locations to support our core markets-including medtech, aerospace and defense, vehicle electrification, and new energy.
Medtech
Beyond bringing an extensive range of defibrillator capacitors from CDE into our portfolio, in 2023, we also released our MD Series of medical grade capacitors. Based on decades of working with designers developing components for implantable medical devices, our MD Series encompasses three product families – C0G, X7R, and X5R monolithic ceramic chips – to offer the broadest variety of medical-grade capacitors that are screened and ready to accommodate your implantable designs. And Knowles also remains the premier provider of trimmer tuning capacitors for magnetic resonance imaging devices.
Aerospace and Defense
The ongoing conflict in the Ukraine has shown that the sophistication of electronic warfare is rapidly increasing. This has quickly driven the need for both highly reliable high-voltage capacitors and RF filters capable of covering increasingly broad ranges. In 2023, we not only added a wide variety of mica and aluminum capacitors from CDE designed for the power supplies, inverters, and communication systems in commercial and military aircraft and sea-going vessels, we also acquired a new YIG technology that enables us to provide tunable filters for multi-frequency threats.
Electric Vehicles and New Energy
In 2023, we saw an expansion of our participation in the growing EV market. While we’ve had a strong presence in onboard vehicle charging systems and ancillary components like the E-compressor, we’re now providing filtering components for EV charging stations. And with the acquisition of CDE, we now have a new range of film capacitor solutions to support power electronics for even more challenging EV charging environments.
We are also bringing our knowledge from many years of working in the EV space to support the power electronics required for the generation, management, and transmission of renewable energy. This includes a growing line of CDE supercapacitors designed to support a wide range of applications such as battery backup in smart meters and regenerative braking.
To wrap up, I want to also recognize that our vision to become the leading global innovator of high-performance precision device solutions would not be possible without the continued diligent efforts and commitment of our entire team. As we head into 2024, I believe that, equally important to the technology we provide, we must remain focused on our internal core values to Achieve, Collaborate, and Transform. Staying focused on these values will ensure we are well prepared to take on new challenges and support the world-changing industries that need our specialty components the most.
Want to learn more about our new range of components designed to help you address even your toughest power electronics challenges in 2024 and beyond? Contact us today.