The thesis describes various forms of voltage conversions to manipulate AC and DC voltages and control techniques to design a controller for a converter. The designed circuit in this thesis utilizes a Jacob's ladder and high voltage transformer to generate electric arc. The high voltage transformer connected to the Jacob's ladder is designed by Dinesh Reddy Vadala and constructed by Shashank R. Nalla.

The power supplied to the step-up transformer is provided by a half-bridge resonant inverter responsible for generating a high frequency sine wave. The resonant inverter's power is supplied by a boost converter, which utilizes a rectified DC low voltage to produce a high DC voltage based upon the reference voltage of the controller. The rectified voltage is provided by a full wave rectifier connected to a step-down transformer, which is responsible for reducing the wall outlet voltage. The controller is the heart of the design and the majority of the circuitry is designed to run the controller efficiently.

The thesis compares the simulated values with the measured values, explores the advantages of various resonant tank topologies and describes two methods to reduce the amount of switching losses.