When I joined the General Electric Company R&D Center in 1970, the world of power electronics was a completely different environment than exists today. There I worked under the tutelage of some of the legends of power electronics such as Bill McMurray, Bernie Bedford, Fred Turnbull, and many others. Those days were still during the era of thyristor technology, dating from 1956, in which the inverters of its day called upon the use of resonant circuits to turn off the thyristors. The McMurray–Bedford inverter, McMurray inverter, and Verhoef inverter were just some of the developments during this period. Because of the numerous modes of operation (leading or lagging power factor, no load or full load, low or high frequency, etc.), analyses ...