LED lighting enters the problems faced by thousands of households

High efficiency, energy saving, environmental protection, and long life make LED one of the most promising applications in recent years. LED has been widely recognized and accepted in commercial lighting applications, and has begun to penetrate into the field of home lighting. Sharp, Toshiba, Panasonic, NEC, Osram and other companies have launched their own home LED lighting products. However, high price and technical challenges such as device reliability, efficiency, and thermal design have constrained the popularity of LED lighting in home applications. Therefore, how to break through price barriers and solve the above technical problems has become a problem that semiconductor manufacturers must first face.

Cost is the biggest obstacle for LEDs to enter the home market

Compared to commercial lighting applications, the huge consumer base has made the LED home lighting market extremely attractive, but the home market is extremely sensitive to cost, which has led to its slow development. PieroBianco, Maxim's HBLED product line business manager, pointed out that "the key factor that restricts LED lighting into home applications is cost. In order to compete with other technologies (fluorescent is its main competitive product) for market share, the price of LED lamps must be controlled at 10 to Less than $15." Liu Xuechao, a senior technology market development engineer at Texas Instruments, agrees. "Although the cost of LEDs is gradually decreasing, there is still a price gap compared to traditional CFL energy-saving lamps." Mainly from three aspects, including high-power LED light source, LED control chip and bulb housing material used for good heat dissipation. Reducing drive cost is one of the effective ways to reduce the cost of the entire LED system. According to Maxim's PieroBianco, the use of a single-stage conversion driver, directly powered by AC power, can effectively reduce costs. Another way is to avoid using electrolytic capacitors in the driver as much as possible. Because LED lamps have a higher operating temperature, advanced electrolytic capacitors must be used to maintain sufficient drive circuit life. Therefore, if electrolytic capacitors are not required in the drive, the corresponding cost will be saved. The company has introduced a single-stage, LED lamp driver solution that eliminates the need for electrolytic capacitors.

Undoubtedly, the improvement of the technical level will help promote the successful application of LED lighting in the home. The luminous efficiency of high-brightness LEDs has been greatly improved in the past few years. With the continuous improvement of luminous efficiency, service life and reliability, the market appeal and application value of LED lighting will continue to increase, and adoption in the home. The rate will also gradually increase. In addition to price, high-brightness LED lighting solutions must also offer dimmable options in order for products to be truly competitive in the home market. By increasing the dimming function, the user can adjust the brightness of the lamp according to actual needs, which also helps to reduce power consumption.

Reliability and thermal design challenges

The key challenge engineers must address when designing LED lighting systems is to maintain high reliability while reducing costs. According to Zheng Lekang, director of marketing for lighting and smart grids at ON Semiconductor, design engineers tend to use lower-level components, such as lower-rated capacitors or lower-precision resistors, to reduce the cost of home LED lighting systems. If a lower rated temperature capacitor is used in the electronic driver portion of a home LED lighting system, these lower temperature rated capacitors are likely to fail after several years (3 to 5 years) of use. Then, the final situation will be that the life of the LED itself in the LED lighting system is as long as 50,000 to 100,000 hours (15 to 20 years), but the electronic driver can only last for 3 to 5 years due to reliability problems. Therefore, engineers should not be designed at the expense of reliability and should ensure that the reliability and longevity of the electronic driver match the reliability and lifetime of the LED.

Good thermal management and efficient drive circuit are important guarantees for efficient LED lighting system. "Otherwise, it may cause system reliability degradation, light decay or even product failure.

For the drive section, efficient thermal management is also necessary to reduce losses by increasing conversion efficiency, thereby reducing heat output. Care must be taken from the design of the controller to the selection of components. "Awakening of the deputy manager of Taiwan's Accumulation Technology LED lighting product line project emphasizes that improper heat dissipation will accelerate the brightness attenuation, thereby reducing the brightness and service life of the product. In addition, due to the harsh working environment of LED lighting (lightning strike, high temperature, etc.), improve The efficiency and reliability of LED drive power has become a design difficulty. From traditional general lighting to LED lighting, it must also meet the high quality requirements of consumers. Liao Guangbin, senior project manager of Liqi Technology, believes that "the demand for LED lighting and traditional lighting products are Power requirements are different, so power supply designs developed specifically for LED lighting are necessary. These requirements include constant current output, Triac dimming, single-input multi-string output design, low output power, high PF, and new architecture to meet high power and low cost requirements. ”

According to Tamara Schmitz, senior applications engineer, "Consumers require designs with power factors of at least 90 and efficiencies of over 80%. In DC applications, the maximum input voltage can exceed approximately 40 V. In AC applications, the input voltage can be 120V or 240V. (maximum 277V). High-brightness LEDs must be driven by PWM running at 120Hz to minimize any visible interference. Sometimes the frequency needs to be changed. In addition to these design constraints, isolation and isolation can be used depending on the application. Non-isolated design.” Therefore, there is no solution for all applications. Each solution is specifically defined by the number of LEDs and the current through the LEDs. Depending on the magnetic component, the selected power component, and the output capacitor, the solution must be adjusted.

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