The losses in a bridge rectifier can easily become significant when low voltages are being rectified. The voltage drop across the bridge is a good 1.5 V, which is a hefty 25% with an input voltage of 6 V. The loss can be reduced by around 50% by using Schottky diodes, but it would naturally be even nicer to reduce it to practically zero. That’s possible with a synchronous rectifier. What that means is using an active switching system instead of a ‘passive’ bridge rectifier.
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