Power electronics is the application of solid-state electronics to the control and conversion of electric power. It also refers to a subject of research in electronic and electrical engineering which deals with the design, control, computation and integration of nonlinear, time-varying energy-processing electronic systems with fast dynamics.

The power electronics field has evolved beyond the status of comprising one or two special-topics courses. In the breadth versus depth tradeoff, it no longer makes sense for one textbook to attempt to cover all of these courses; indeed, each course should ideally employ a dedicated textbook.

In the power electronics literature, much has been made of the incorporation of other disciplines such as circuits, electronic devices, control systems, magnetic, and power applications, into the power electronics field. Yet the field has evolved, and now is more than a mere collection of circuits and applications linked to the fundamentals of other disciplines. There is a set of fundamentals that are unique to the field of power electronics. It is important to identify these fundamentals, and to explicitly academic conferences, and other affairs around these fundamentals. This book is organized around the fundamental principles, while the applications and circuits are introduced along the way as examples.