Selection guides, application notes and design checks for rectifiers, Schottky diodes, TVS protection, MOSFETs, SiC and IGBTs — written for engineers and sourcing teams.
There are three ways to make a 5 V rail from a higher supply, and they are not equivalent. A Zener shunt is simple and cheap but wastes power as soon as the load is small; a linear LDO is cleaner but burns the same drop as heat; a buck DC-DC is efficient but adds … Read more
Every switch cycle in a flyback converter ends the same way: the switch turns off, the leakage energy in the transformer releases, and the output rectifier rings like a struck bell. The spike and the oscillation have a rhythm you can measure on a scope, and the snubber is the tuning that damps it. This … Read more
The gate oxide of a MOSFET is a door roughly 20 nanometers thick, and spikes and ringing can break it. A gate driven past its voltage limit, or hit by a fast dv/dt spike, fails the part in an instant — and the Zener clamp is the doorstop that holds the door. This article explains … Read more
Repairing a power supply is not a parts-drawer exercise; it is a sequence, and the sequence starts with safety. The order of actions — discharge, isolate, limit, test — is what separates a safe repair from a dangerous one and a quick diagnosis from a parts swap that fails again. This article builds the safety-first … Read more
A rectifier-based power stage fails in the field for a small set of reasons, and the reasons are nearly all visible before the board ships. The ten-check audit turns that knowledge into a release gate: ten questions, each with a pass criterion and a trace to the design method that answers it. This article presents … Read more
A single source is one fire away from stopping the line. A fire, a strike, a trade restriction, or a supplier’s own quality problem can all take a sole-sourced part off the market, and the board stops shipping with it. Second-sourcing turns that risk into a qualification flow: a defined set of gates that prove … Read more
The price advantage of buying discrete power parts from China is real, and so is the hidden cost of getting it wrong. The difference between a good purchase and a bad one is decided before the money moves: the five documents and the three tests that verify the supplier and the part. This article balances … Read more
A factory audit finds the real problems by following one part from the wafer to the box, because the failures appear at the hand-offs between the stages. The wafer that looked clean, the assembly that looked correct, and the test that looked complete can all be right on their own and still deliver a bad … Read more
A counterfeit semiconductor is usually bought for a reason that sounds sensible — a price below the market, a part in stock when nobody else has it — and the counterfeit is revealed by clues that are visible before the part ever powers up. The price gap, the packaging inconsistencies, and the electrical data all … Read more
Every power design starts with a loss number, and most loss numbers are wrong in the same way: they count the obvious term and miss the one that grows with frequency. A diode in a power circuit loses power in three distinct ways — conduction, switching, and recovery — and each term maps to a … Read more
Derating is not pessimism; it is a budget. The datasheet ratings of a power diode describe a clean, controlled test at 25 C — and the real world adds temperature, transients, lot variation, and duty that the test never included. The derating rules set aside the margin that buys the design against those unknowns. This … Read more
The power semiconductor market in 2026 assembles itself around three demand centers — electric vehicles, solar and storage, and AI data-center compute — and the interesting news is not which of the three grew, but that they now pull on the same component families at the same time. A SiC diode can serve a solar … Read more
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