Power Supply

Editor’s Choice: Power Supplies and Snubber Caps

Feb. 5, 2020

Power supplies are everywhere and there are a lot of options for designers. Knowing the differences can help in selecting one for a particular application.

William G. Wong

One of the hottest areas on Electronic Design is power management and power supplies are front and center. Here are a few recent articles that cover this topic area that you might find useful.

What’s the Difference Between RMS and Peak Watts?

Root mean square (RMS) and peak power ratings are basic power-handling terms. If you’re looking to build a high-performance entertainment system, you should understand exactly what they represent.

Making a dc voltage from an ac source means you will have to rectify the ac voltage to get a dc bus. One difference compared to a dc-dc converter is that you can use a linear power supply with an ac voltage. Significant complications arise when trying to get your power supply working from a wall outlet.

A snubber capacitor will reduce the spikes in your converter design, protecting the transistors and reducing EMI. Snubbers are also used in the output of Class-D audio amplifiers for the same reasons.

Ed Jan 2020 Power Offline Power Supplies

Designing power supplies that work from wall outlets has multiple challenges. This FAQ should answer many of your questions.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.