Teardown of an ATX PC Power Supply
canopic jug writes:
Ken Shirriff has carefully disassembled an ATX PC power supply and blogged about his findings.
Have you ever wondered what's inside your computer's power supply? The task of a PC power supply is to convert the power from the wall (120 or 240 volts AC) into stable power at the DC voltages that the computer requires. The power supply must be compact and low-cost while transforming the power efficiently and safely. To achieve these goals, power supplies use a variety of techniques and are more complex inside than you might expect. In this blog post, I tear down a PC power supply and explain how it works.1
The power supply I examined, like most modern power supplies uses a design known as a "switching power supply." Switching power supplies are now very cheap, but this wasn't always the case. In the 1950s, switching power supplies were complex and expensive, used in aerospace and satellite applications that needed small, lightweight power supplies. By the early 1970s, though, new high-voltage transistors and other technology improvements made switching power supplies much cheaper and they became widely used in computers. Now, you can buy a phone charger for a few dollars that contains a switching power supply.
He goes through the input filtering, rectification, isolation boundary, splitting of DC, and other aspects including the standby mode circuits. He has written before about various power supplies and chargers before, including a historical overview in IEEE Spectrum.
Previously:
Ken Shirriff Unfolds A Nuclear Missile Guidance Computer With Impressive Memory
How "Special Register Groups" Invaded Computer Dictionaries for Decades
Mature Mainframe Prints Mandlebrot Fractal in 12 Minutes.
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