Before discussing the chips themselves, it is important to understand a little bit about power architectures. A very popular architecture of offline power conversion for sub-100 W applications is the flyback converter. It is very simple from a power component standpoint, one controller and one switch; perhaps a few smaller protection devices, as well as some analog circuitry for doing standard feedback control. Standard feedback control is seen on the left hand side of this slide. It requires circuitry on the secondary side of the transformer to determine the output and how to regulate it, whether that be for constant voltage or constant current. This circuitry connects back through an opto-coupler to the primary side control IC, communicating information across the isolation barrier provided by the transformer. This architecture is an established standard, but recently algorithms have been developed to reduce the cost of this system dramatically. That is primary side regulation operation. Primary side regulation is shown for the flyback architecture on the right side of the slide. It embeds intelligence into the primary side IC for control of regulation of the output without having to have any communication from the secondary side through an opto-coupler. Notice how the secondary circuitry has been simplified dramatically, removing the feedback regulator, reducing any expenses incurred, and eliminating the opto-coupler. However, primary side regulation typically comes at the cost of reduced regulation accuracy and dynamic performance.