Welcome back to this week’s installment of Scope Noob where I’m sharing my experiences learning to use my first oscilloscope. Last week I started out measuring mains frequency using an AC-AC wall wart ...

Everyone loves a full-wave bridge rectifier, but there’s no denying that they aren’t 100% efficient due to the diode voltage drop. Which isn’t to say that with some effort we cannot create an ideal ...

Electronic engineers know the common mantras when it comes to creating new designs: Make it cheaper. Make it smaller. Make it faster. These goals, along with technological evolution, keep most ...

Alpha and Omega Semiconductor has announced a family of active diodes which can reduce the 1.2V forward drop of 600V bridge rectifiers. “Both products are self-powered from the AC line and do not ...

Using a few diodes and a LED, you can make a nice indicator as shown in associated schematic diagram that can be used for a lot of applications (with a bit of luck). It’s quite suitable for use in ...

Linear Technology has released a controller chip that turns four n-mosfets into an active bridge rectifier and cut the expected voltage drop of a bridge from 1.2V to under 100mV, dramatically cutting ...

A major cause of losses in a conventional power supply using a 50/60-Hz transformer is the bridge rectifier. This article shows how to build a “greener” rectifier, substantially reducing losses by ...

With Linear Technology’s LT4320 ideal-diode bridge controller, power supply designers can replace each of the four diodes in a conventional full-wave bridge rectifier with a low-loss N-channel MOSFET.