James

A MOSFET and an IGBT can both switch high power, and the choice between them is not about which is “better” but about where the duty sits. The MOSFET wins at moderate voltage and high frequency; the IGBT wins at high voltage and high current where its lower conduction loss and simpler structure take over. … Read more

Lightning does not have to strike your building to damage the electronics inside it. A strike a mile away couples energy into the power lines, the ground, and the structures that carry it to your board through doors a designer never considered — the mains input, the telephone or network line, the ground rod, and … Read more

The safe-operating-area curve is the MOSFET datasheet page that looks like a simple V-I plot and behaves like a set of stacked limits. A single DC operating point sits inside a thermal box; a pulse train can reach far higher current but only for a limited time; and the slope of the boundary lines changes … Read more

A USB port is one of the most ESD-exposed points on a product because it is touched, plugged, and unplugged constantly, bringing a charged human body or cable near the connector. The protection decision is not “does the port need ESD diodes” but “where on the connector do they go, and which lines actually need … Read more

Silicon carbide and gallium nitride are the two wide-bandgap materials changing power electronics, and most explanations start with a physics term that scares off exactly the people who need the answer. The plain-language version is simpler: both materials let a device switch faster, hold more voltage, and run hotter than silicon, and the two differ … Read more

A TVS diode protects a rail by clamping an overvoltage, and getting the protection right is a window problem: the standoff voltage must sit high enough that normal operation never trips the device, and the clamping voltage must sit low enough that the protected circuit survives the clamp. Between those two lines, the breakdown voltage … Read more

Selecting a MOSFET for a switching power supply is usually presented as a parts hunt — filter the catalog by voltage, pick a low RDS(on), done. The parts hunt fails in practice because two different loops close at the same time. One loop is thermal: the design’s loss budget closes on RDS(on) and the switching … Read more

A MOSFET datasheet is a compact page of critical parameters, and the ones that decide a design are fewer than they look — but each carries conditions that change its meaning. The on-resistance is quoted at a temperature and current. The threshold voltage is a range, not a point. The safe-operating-area curve is a set … Read more

The surge protector market speaks in joule numbers, and the numbers say less than the marketing implies. A 1000-joule protector and a 5000-joule protector both promise to save your electronics, and neither the joule count alone nor the sticker on the box tells you whether a strike will actually be diverted. The honest reading of … Read more

A single DC rail can carry three different-looking diodes, and the beginner assumption that they all do the same job is the root of most misapplied protection. A Zener, a TVS, and an ESD diode on the same rail answer three different questions: the Zener regulates a slow voltage, the TVS diverts a fast surge … Read more

A TVS is rated in watts and joules, and the first question every protection designer asks is what those numbers actually mean. A “600 W” TVS and a “1500 W” TVS look like a power comparison, but neither number is a steady-state power rating — both describe the device’s ability to absorb a transient pulse … Read more

A power supply built on the wrong material chemistry pays for capability it never uses. Silicon is the cost baseline; silicon carbide buys high-voltage and high-temperature headroom; gallium nitride buys switching speed and compactness. The three are not rivals for the same job — they map onto different stages of the same supply. A charger … Read more