Articles - Supply - 9

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 ...

Question: How do you measure inductor current? Answer: Switched-mode power supplies commonly use inductors for temporarily storing energy. In the evaluation of these power supplies, it is often useful to measure the inductor current to gain a ...

Matthew Carroll Pennsylvania State University A team of scientists has developed a new mechanism to harvest stray magnetic fields all around us and convert the energy into useful, usable electricity. (Image credit: Kai Wang.) The electricity that ...

Jeff Sorensen EDN 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the Greinacher voltage multiplier, invented by Swiss physicist Heinrich Greinacher in 1919. In 1932, Douglas Cockcroft and Ernest Walton used this basic circuit to power a particle accelerator, ...

Increasing the output voltage of IC operational amplifiers usually involves adding high-voltage external transistors. The resulting circuit then requires correction to retain its operating characteristics. This correction is difficult, especially ...

Justin Larson,Frank Kolanko EDN Buck regulators operating in CCM (continuous-conduction mode) have straightforward operation, allowing for easy calculation of output voltage and system design. However, lightly loaded buck regulators operate in DCM ...

Switching regulators use a duty cycle to realize voltage or current feedback control. The duty cycle is the ratio of the turn-on time (T ON ) to the complete cycle length, the turn-off time (T OFF ) plus on time, and defines a simple relationship ...

Electromagnetic compatibility and oftentimes PCB trace routing are key participants in the switching-regulator hot-loop phenomenon. The term hot loop is relevant whenever switching regulators and their electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) are ...

A collaborative research project is making use of temperature fluctuations to produce electricity. Generating electricity in unique ways is getting the attention of scientists at the University at Buffalo and MIT. Collaborative research project led ...