The front-end stage of conventional off-line converters, typically made up of a full wave rectifier bridge with a capacitor filter, gets an unregulatedDC bus from the AC mains. The filter capacitor must be large enough to have a relatively low ripple superimposed on the DC level. This means that the instantaneous line voltage is below the voltage on the capacitor most of the time, thus the rectifiers conduct only for a small portion of each line half-cycle. The current drawn from the mains is then a series of narrow pulses whose amplitude is 5-10 times higher than the resulting DC value.