So what is this?. A bridge rectifier with a buck dc/dc down converter on a single die?
there's no info on how it's done, but rectification doesn't seem to be the way. All I could find on their site was this:
By eliminating the conventional process of transforming and rectifying the AC sine wave ...
"We discovered a way the physics of electricity can be managed digitally through silicon chips, which changes everything for how all electrical products and even silicon chip solutions are designed," Casey added. "Digitizing the AC sinewave is a profound breakthrough for building products because we can now use software and algorithms in a silicon chip to control every aspect of electricity"
Wonder what they're doing with the heat
You could probably rectify with a set of transistors rather than diodes given you can measure or predict where in the sine wave the current instant is but like you said its going to be low power or you will have to deal with the heat.
Where's the inductor? I don't think they can fit on piece of silicon.
Plus this will have no isolation from mains. Enjoy your death USB charger when the silicon melts over from a power surge.
Maybe it's the reverse of a flying capacitor supply. Connect a bunch of capacitors in series to the line, then connect them in parallel for the output. They could reconfigure them during the changing waveform (more in parallel as the sine wave voltage gets lower, hence their "digitization" comment.
Most likely, it's garbage or just a niche thing for micro-power IoT devices.
I found using the inductorless switching supply.
The SR086/SR087 are inductorless switching regulators designed to operate directly from a rectified AC line. The operating principle is to turn on a pass transistor when the rectified AC is below the output voltage and to turn it off when the output voltage reaches a specific level. The ICs feature an adjustable main output voltage of 9V to 50V and an additional fixed output of 3.3V for SR086 and 5V for SR087. Efficiencies of around 55% may be realized for loads up to 1W in 120 VAC applications and about 50% efficiencies for loads up to 800 mW in 230 VAC applications.
(post is archived)