Diode Limiter

The diode limiter also called Clipper as it is used to limit the input voltage.when the positive cycle of the input wave comes, the diode becomes forward biased (fig. 2). As the cathode now at zero volts 0 v,the anode cannot exceed 0.07 volts assuming diode is a silicon diode.

So it limited to 0.7 volts as positive cycles comes from input voltage.When negative cycle comes the diode become reverse biased and at the output load we only get the negative cycle with clipped positive cycle.

And if we put the diode in reverse we will get the positive cycle with the clipped negative cycle
as shown below in the figure.





Figure 1: Shows the input
Figure 2: positive cycle clipped.
Figure 3: Negative cycle clipped.
Figure 4: Both the positive and negatice cycles are clipped.