Key facts
- Component type
- Semiconductor
- Inventor
- Karol Pollak in 1895
via Wikipedia infobox
~6 min read
Encyclopedic overview
A hand-made diode bridge. The silver band on the diodes indicates the cathode side of the diode.
A diode bridge is a bridge rectifier circuit of four diodes that is used in the process of converting alternating current (AC) from the input terminals to direct current (DC, i.e. fixed polarity) on the output terminals. Its function is to convert the negative voltage portions of the AC waveform to positive voltage, after which a low-pass filter can be used to smooth the result into DC.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “diode bridge” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.