5. Conclusion

Power electronics are constantly evolving. Today's choices will not necessarily be tomorrow's, but they will be tomorrow's ferment. Fortunately, the pace of change is slower than that of information technology, and it will take a decade for a new generation of concepts and converters to emerge.

The trend is to reduce the size of the "power supply" part of an electronic board. The engineer in charge of an electronic board's power supply must be able to draw on the solutions offered by developments in power electronics to adapt a circuit that suits the application.

To better understand the concepts behind power electronics, we need to understand the topics listed in figure 18 . At first glance, the...