James 
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
Size a bridge rectifier from a DC motor’s nameplate and you will be wrong in the safe direction almost every time — the rectifier will be too big, cost too much, and waste space. Size it from the nameplate and your design will occasionally be catastrophically wrong, because the nameplate current is the running current, … Read more
Measure the forward voltage of a diode with a multimeter and you will get a number; read the same diode’s datasheet and the VF printed there is almost never the number you just measured. Neither reading is wrong — they are answers to different questions. A multimeter exercises the junction at microamps with a short … Read more
A 3.3 V rail that loses 0.7 V to a diode is not losing a rounding error — it is giving up 21% of its voltage before the load even sees it. On a 5 V rail the same diode takes 14%. Those two numbers are why the “just grab any diode” habit stops working … Read more
Ask three people how to size the capacitor after a bridge rectifier and you will hear “1000 µF per amp” from two of them. That rule works well enough in a surprising number of low-power circuits, which is exactly why it survives — and why it is dangerous. A 1 A, 50 Hz full-wave rail … Read more
A Zener datasheet looks shorter than a rectifier datasheet — a few voltage numbers, a current or two, a temperature coefficient — yet it is one of the easiest spec sheets to misread. The nominal voltage is printed with a tolerance, the current used for the test is hidden in the fine print, and the … Read more
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