LED lighting market detonated huge demand for LED drivers

As early as 2003, Lumileds Lighting's Roland Haitz suggested that LEDs can double the brightness every 18 to 24 months. This is the famous Haitz's law (Figure 1), also known as the Moore's Law for the LED industry. . According to this law, LEDs with a breakthrough brightness of 100 lm/W appear around 2008-2010. In fact, in June 2006, Japan Nichia Corporation launched a 100lm/W white LED engineering sample. In June 2007, Cree announced the introduction of a high-brightness LED with a minimum luminous flux of 100lm at 350mA.

Figure 1 LED doubles brightness every 18 to 24 months

Research shows that in the United States alone, if 55% of incandescent lamps and 55% of fluorescent lamps are replaced by LEDs, annual savings of $35 billion in electricity bills, 7.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions, LED energy-efficient advantages, and declining costs will be Gradually become an alternative source of incandescent and fluorescent lamps. In the "National Medium- and Long-Term Science and Technology Development Plan (2006~2020)" published by China on February 9, 2006, "Energy-efficient, long-life semiconductor lighting products" was included in the first key areas of medium and long-term planning. The first priority theme, the ten major energy-saving projects in the “Eleventh Five-Year Plan” are green lighting, and the promotion of energy-efficient lighting systems in public facilities, hotels, commercial buildings, office buildings and residential buildings, which indicates a huge market for the LED lighting market. potential. It is predicted that by 2020, the LED lighting market will reach a scale of 155 billion US dollars, so there will be a huge demand for LED drivers.

High-efficiency LED driver requirements combined with multiple drive technologies

The electrical/optical conversion process of the LED lighting system starts from the power supply section and includes power management and conversion, driver, thermal management, sensing and control, LED, light mixing and scattering, optical extraction, etc., as shown in Figure 2. It can be seen that the electrical/optical conversion efficiency of LED lighting systems depends not only on LEDs, but also on various electronic and optical components. Therefore, improving the conversion efficiency of electric/optical power is a huge system engineering and requires coordination across the industry. Cooperate and work hard.

Figure 2 Electro-optical conversion process of LED lighting system