Voltage doubler

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A voltage doubler is an electronic circuit that charges capacitors from the input voltage and switches these charges in such a way that, in the ideal case, exactly twice the voltage is produced at the output as at its input. The simplest of these circuits is a form of rectifier which takes an AC voltage as input and outputs a doubled DC voltage. The switching elements are simple diodes, driven to switch state merely by the alternating voltage of the input. DC-to-DC voltage doublers cannot switch in this way and require a driving circuit to control the switching. They frequently also require a switching element that can be controlled directly, such as a transistor, rather than relying on the voltage across the switch as in the simple AC-to-DC case. Voltage doublers are a variety of voltage multiplier circuits. Many, but not all, voltage doubler circuits can be viewed as a single stage of a higher-order multiplier: cascading identical stages together achieves a greater voltage multiplication.

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