Selection guides, application notes and design checks for rectifiers, Schottky diodes, TVS protection, MOSFETs, SiC and IGBTs — written for engineers and sourcing teams.
Cranking is the two-second blackout of the 12 V rail. The starter motor pulls hundreds of amps, the battery voltage collapses toward 6-8 V, and every module on the rail — the ECU, the lighting, the pump — lives through the dip. The diodes and TVS do not stop the collapse; they survive it, hold … Read more
A hot rectifier summons the same reflex every time: swap the diode for a “bigger” one and hope. That reflex works when the diode is genuinely undersized and silently wastes money when it is not, because four of the six causes of rectifier overheating have nothing to do with the diode’s current rating. The faster … Read more
The AC loop and the DC loop of a rectifier stage are two antennas, and their size is entirely under the designer’s control. A layout that keeps the loops small stays quiet; one that lets them grow radiates switching noise the components never intended. This article frames the loop-as-antenna idea, shows the trace, via, and … Read more
The 1N4728A is a 3.3 V Zener diode that a buyer and a repair bench read in two completely different ways. The buyer sees a part number, a voltage rating, and a price; the bench sees a curve to measure, a breakdown knee to find, and a part to verify before trusting it. Both workflows … Read more
An LED driver is not a voltage supply with LEDs attached; it is a constant-current system, and the rectifier sees that system’s unique stress. The rail holds a fixed current, the PWM dimming writes sharp edges into the electrical stream, and the sealed luminaire keeps the heat in. This article explains what the diode actually … Read more
An ATX power supply is the most common power electronics board most people will ever open, and it is also the one most often misdiagnosed. From wall plug to 12 V rail, the board walks through a defined chain — input bridge, PFC, rectification, down-conversion — and each step has a diode with a job … Read more
The AWSS family answers most automotive Schottky selection questions with a single table. Four parts — built from 5 A or 10 A current classes and 60 V or 100 V voltage classes — cover the lighting, ECU, and body-control loads that dominate automotive modules, and the family matrix maps each part to the load … Read more
The stored charge in a diode junction is a time bomb that releases every time the diode turns off. In an SMPS switching at high frequency, that release happens thousands of times per second, and each release sends a current overshoot back into the inductor — a spike that heats, stresses neighbors, and radiates EMI … Read more
Every SMPS has an output rectifier, and every output rectifier is a choice between three technologies that hide different loss envelopes. A fast-recovery diode, a Schottky, and a synchronous-rectifier MOSFET can all be the “right” answer depending on the output voltage, the switching frequency, and the loss split of the specific converter. This article pairs … Read more
A switching power supply looks like a box of unrelated parts until you see the jobs. Five component types — the switch, the transformer, the rectifier diode, the output capacitor, and the controller — carry the whole conversion, and each one is a worker with a specific job whose failure has a specific signature. When … Read more
The on-board charger (OBC) is a box with two very different power stages inside it, and the efficiency number on the datasheet hides both of them. Up front, the PFC stage wants speed — fast diodes that can switch at high frequency to clean up the grid-side power factor. Behind it, the DC-DC stage wants … Read more
One trades heat for noise. That sentence is the whole story of linear versus switching power supplies, because every difference between the two topologies traces back to whether they convert the line power with a switching element or without one. A linear supply is simple, quiet, and inefficient — most of the wasted energy leaves … Read more
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