Practical Design of a Buck Converter
Part 1: Buck Converter Design
by Dennis L. Feucht

The purpose of this design mini-course is to take those familiar with analog circuit design, but not power electronics, through the detailed design of a very common type of switching power converter as an example.

A converter is a dc-dc power supply. The term dc is ambiguous meaning either unipolar or constant. For converters, it generally means unipolar, and often means constant too. For line-operated inputs, the familiar rectifier and storage capacitor can be used to provide unregulated input dc. Some low-power converters, such as the ICL7660, use switched-capacitor circuits for conversion, but they cannot store energy as densely as magnetic materials and are useful only at low power: here we will use magnetics for higher power.

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