Articles - Supply - 9

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 ...

The flyback topology is a versatile, widely used, switched-mode power-supply design with some interesting characteristics that brings performance and BOM advantages to many applications. The flyback design is a switched-mode power supply (SMPS) ...

Applying the physics principle of radiative sky cooling, a team was able to harvest a small but useful amount of energy from the cool night sky using a simple, low-cost, non-critical arrangement. Approaches to harvesting “free” energy ...