Articles - Supply - 8

What’s the difference between power and energy density, and why is the former so vital to power-supply design? Let’s find out. To design robust power supplies, designers need to understand some basics and pitfalls. Is power density the ...

Resistive dividers attenuate high voltages down to a level that low voltage circuits can accommodate without getting overdriven or damaged. In power path control circuits, resistive dividers help set up power supply undervoltage and overvoltage ...

Most handheld devices use alkaline or rechargeable batteries, and measuring the battery capacity is a crucial feature of such designs. Most of the time, however, using a battery level monitoring IC may be a luxury for budget-tight projects. Here is ...

Small-scale energy harvesting is often an attractive option for supplemental powering of devices having ultra-low power or low-rate/low duty-cycle needs, such as wearables, wireless IoT sensor nodes, and asset trackers. That’s because the ...

Source: tektonministries.org . LEDs are increasingly being used as energy saving light sources as a response to new energy regulations. They have decisive advantages over conventional lights: they consume less energy, have longer lifetimes, and are ...

In a synchronous, buck switching power supply, the two FETs and the output inductor meet at the phase node (Figure 1). The phase node often connects directly to the control IC. The voltage on this node swings from the input voltage to some voltage ...

Last October, after seven months of silence due to a major upgrade of the 70 m wide radio antenna located in Canberra, NASA sent a set of commands to a 43 year-old spacecraft, Voyager 2. Billions of miles from earth since its launch in 1977, ...

Galvanically isolated power supplies are used in numerous applications for different reasons. In some circuits, galvanic isolation is necessary due to safety considerations. In other circuits, functional isolation is used to block any interference ...

EDN As much as we’d prefer to be able to use just unforced, natural convection cooling, many designs and installations simply cannot be cooled adequately by the low level and uncertainty of airflow that this low-cost, reliable approach ...

By Michael O'Loughlin EDN In certain applications, design requirements may call upon a system's switched-mode power supply to more promptly deliver its output than would the garden-variety power supply. Figure 1 shows such a supply's ...