One basic way to drop voltage is with a linear regulator, which offers advantage of being simple, but at cost of inefficiency. How much is … Read More

Linear regulators look straightforward. Feed them a big input voltage and they spit out a nice low output voltage. That happens until your design melts … Read More

A buck converter is one type of step-down switching regulator. The buck converter duty cycle calculator makes it easy to solve a quick version of … Read More

Switch-mode power supplies are a timing puzzle, get it right, and your circuit succeeds. Get it wrong and it doesn’t work at all. One key … Read More

But all those watts aren’t delivered in an undivided pool by a power supply. Within each ATX unit, energy is divided into different voltage rails … Read More

Your power supply doesn’t convert 100% of the watts pulled from the wall. During the process, some of the AC electricity turn into heat. How … Read More

A simple component wattage estimator can’t answer the question, but a power supply headroom calculator does. It doesn’t tell you how many watts your processor … Read More

A PC’s power supply is among the last things to plan when building your system, and among the simplest to screw up. Too small a … Read More

When the grid flickers, you don’t want your work lost, so you buy a UPS. But there’s a trap in its specs that waits for … Read More

The primary question around backup power is “how long will it last?” That’s where a UPS runtime calculator comes in. If it gets me through … Read More