Source: Ali Bazzi, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT. DC power is unidirectional and flows in one direction, whereas, AC current alternates directions at a frequency of 50-60 Hz. Most common electronic devices are designed to run off of AC power; therefore an input DC source must be inverted to AC. Inverters convert DC voltage to AC through switching action that repeatedly flips the polarity of the input DC source at the output or load side for part of a switching period. A typical power inverter requires a stable DC power input, which is then switched repeatedly using mechanical or electromagnetic switches. The output can be a square-wave, sine-wave or a variation of a sine-wave, depending on circuit design and the user needs. The objective of this experiment is to build and analyze the operation of DC/AC half-bridge inverters. Half-bridge inverters are the simplest form of DC/AC inverters, but are the building blocks for H-bridge, three-phase, and multi-level inverters. Square-wave switching is studied here for simplicity, but sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM) and other modulation and switching schemes are typically used in DC/AC inverters.