Power Supply Design Tutorial

This power supply tutorial is unlike any other you have probably seen. Instead of taking the text-book approach with an emphasis on mathematics, the emphasis is on understanding what is happening in the physical sense. What you see when you look at a power supply, look at a schematic, or look at your lab instruments. While other aspects are covered, the emphasis is on switching-mode power supply design. This power supply tutorial is meant to take the pain away when you just need to figure out what is going on.

Not that I have anything against power supply and power electronics books -- I have dozens of them on my book shelves and about ten of the most useful are lined up next to my computer screen so I can refer to them by swiveling my chair. At least one good power supply design text book is essential to your full understanding of power supply design. But they are written for other reasons than giving you a quick understanding of the problem at hand -- the goal of this website.

I'm fairly confident that if you are a student learning the discipline of power supply design either by taking university courses or learning it on your own, or being thrust into a power supply design after years of doing other design work, or even a power supply designer with years of experience, you will benefit by using this tutorial augmented with a good power supply design text.

This confidence is based on 48 years of power supply design and mentoring young engineers confronted with their first design assignment and even experienced power supply designers who need to talk over some power supply design problem.

As material is added to this website, some of it may look familiar. I'm revising material from the power supply design tutorial on my main website, www.smpstech.com, and removing it from that website (to avoid duplicate content) and adding it this website. The reason is that the other website has become so large that it has gotten to be a daunting experience to upgrade. By breaking out the tutorial material to this websites, I can better keep the material and website updated. Stay tuned. Material should be transferred and updated with new material on a weekly basis. Watch the links activate in the menu column as material is added. Refresh the website each time you visit to make sure you are seeing an up-to-date page and menu.

Jerrold Foutz, Alta Loma, California, October 2007

Do not use this information for design without independent verification of the information.