Energy storage is a significant en-abler for a great many application spaces. Today's information-based cloud-enabled society runs on batteries. Most industrial systems and all fossil-fuel vehicles use batteries for backup power, and next-generation methods of storing and shifting energy will be a critical aspect of the smart grid. The growth of electric vehicles (EVs) has also created a huge market for large-scale battery charging (Fig. 1).These batteries come in a variety of chemistries, form factors, and output voltages but have one common denominator (beyond the obvious one). They all eventually stop delivering power and must be recharged or recycled. Recharging batteries has developed into a major application space with a wide palette of advanced solutions available.Battery chargers fall broadly into two types: those that are mounted inside the product and those that have separate packaging and are deployed externally. Internal chargers are almost always DC-input devices, and just about every external charger accepts a 110-V or 220-V AC input. The general deployment for a portable device is an internal DC/ DC battery charger driven by an external AC/DC power adapter.
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