Article Abstracts | January 2008
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Matching Driver to LED
LED illumination design includes understanding the electrical drive slice of the lighting pie.
by Chris Richardson, National Semiconductor Corp.
LED lighting offers many potential benefits over incandescent, halogen, fluorescent and gas/arc lamps, and lighting designers are eager to take advantage of those benefits. Although it is the market for retrofitting that is immense, it is the ground-up design of solid-state lighting that exhilarates the lighting design community. For an LED lamp design to be successful, three major aspects must be managed carefully: the electrical drive, the thermal energy and the optics. Successfully balancing all three can produce solid-state lighting with a long life, high electrical efficiency, high luminous efficacy and pure color (or tightly controlled color temperature for white LEDs).
A single LED die intended for solid-state illumination generally is made from one of two semiconductor materials. Red, orange and amber LEDs are made almost exclusively from InAlGaP. Green and blue LEDs are made almost exclusively with InGaN. White LEDs generally are made from a blue LED with a conversion phosphor and, from an electrical drive standpoint, are identical to blue LEDs...
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