Power processing unit

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Power processing unit" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A power processing unit (PPU) is a circuit device that convert an electricity input from a utility line into the appropriate voltage and current to be used for the device in question. They serve the same purpose as linear amplifiers, but they are much more efficient, since the use of linear amplifiers results in much power loss due to the use of a resistor to change the voltage and current. Instead of using a resistor, PPUs use switches to turn a signal on and off quite rapidly in order to change the average current and voltage. In this way, they could be conflated with DC-AC converters, but the frequency at which they switch the signal on and off is a few orders of magnitude higher than that of AC signals. They are used to convert the current and voltage of both direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC) signals.^[1]