Back to Basics: The Fundamentals of Power

Figure 1: 45% of worldwide power
consumption fuels motors

Ask any number of engineers to define "power" and you'll get any number of answers, and none of them would necessarily be wrong. Sometimes it's just a matter of perspective.

Testing Techniques For Switch-Mode Power Supplies

Figure 1: A simplified schematic of
a switch-mode power supply circuit

On its journey from wall socket to the device being powered, power typically passes through a switch-mode power supply, where the AC signal is rectified into DC before it reaches the device. After that, the DC signal (often 5 V) is passed on to DC-DC converters on the device's PC board for feeding various voltages to branches of the device's power-delivery network. Let's look at some of the measurement techniques and considerations relative to testing switch-mode power supplies.