Bright market prospects LED drive IC to climb the peak

Due to the commercialization of high brightness LED, as well as the continued decline in the price of LED, making LED quickly into the multi application areas, but also makes the development of LED terminal products more quickly. Among them, play an important role, is able to drive LED light-emitting LED driver IC. This paper will introduce the current situation of the market demand of LED driven IC, and the latest developments of the relevant manufacturers.

LED, the luminescence principle, simply convert electrical energy into light, an electric current through a semiconductor compound, through a combination of electron and hole, the excess energy will be released in the form of light, achieve the luminous effect. The higher the forward current of LED is, the higher the brightness will be. At the same time, the current stability will affect the stability of LED. As a result, the use of LED can provide accurate current drive IC to become the mainstream market.

The characteristics of LED driver IC is the consistency and constancy of current output. LED driver IC need to control one or more LED, LED luminous brightness and electrical flow through the roughly linear proportional relationship, so to make the LED issued the same brightness, must be kept together with the amount of LED current consistent. Because of the slight changes in the current will affect the brightness, which will be unacceptable for many applications of LED.

In addition, the LED itself is still possible because of the temperature or the use of time and other issues caused by the decline of efficiency, so the LED driver IC itself must be designed to effectively detect the internal error mechanism LED. And because the process of the epitaxial growth of the vendor may cause the difference of the LED grain, the LED can be used to drive the IC to change the digital code.

LED driver IC can use PWM signal control technology, dimming control, and maintain a stable LED brightness, effectively extend battery life.

LED driven IC market demand

LED drive IC market demand, according to the classification should be used there are three categories, namely consumer electronics, automotive lighting, and architectural decoration and household lighting, etc.. Consumer electronics products are characterized by the use of battery energy, generally 4.2 ~ 8.4V, so low voltage, low current LED driver IC is the most in line with the demand, and a large amount of wide range of products. Automotive lighting products, due to its power from the car battery, generally 48V, so the need for higher voltage step-down LED driver IC. As for the architectural lighting and home lighting, the AC power supply will be directly converted into DC power supply LED driver IC, that is, the AC to DC power supply, and at the same time complete with the LED voltage and current matching. Therefore, different applications of the LED drive IC will be completely different.

In the market demand, the number of LED used in automotive lighting is more, most of the series, parallel drive, the need for higher voltage, 48V car battery power is very convenient. Currently able to 60V high voltage LED drive IC new products have been more common. In front of the automotive market directly using LED dashboard backlight, front and rear fog lights, third brake lights, direction lights, as well as taillights market is very promising.

Architectural decoration and home lighting, the demand will be directly converted into AC power DC DC power supply LED driver IC, can not provide a single SoC integrated circuit products, mostly modules. Architectural lighting has been widely used in many cities. In the future, the demand for domestic LED lighting will be very large, however, there is still a certain distance between domestic LED lighting technology and production cost.

As for consumer electronics products LED drive IC, it has a relatively mature technology, products and relatively mature market.

Due to the diversification of LED applications, so LED driver IC manufacturers must also be designed according to different products, due to the diversification of downstream customers, the company's layout strategy will also affect the long-term development of the future. LED IC in the main drive control current through LED, focuses on stability and low power consumption in the design, emphasizing the debug function, often uses PWM (pulse width modulation) technology to control the LED dimming, therefore has similarities with the IC simulation technology. However, compared with the overall growth of the LED industry as a whole analog IC industry, and the rapid increase in the penetration rate of LED backlight applications, making the future growth of LED driver IC is very optimistic. The LED driver IC market for the foreign world, China's LED driver IC vendors in the initial stage, in addition to the large billboard ink deep, there will be more room for growth in the mobile phone, consumer electronics and NB Backlight Market in the future.

Driving IC vendor dynamics

Avago for building and commercial lighting launched tricolor high power LED

Annwa Technology (Avago) launched the first 3W Moonstone red, green, blue three color LED products, suitable for a wide range of architectural and commercial solid state lighting applications. The three LED provides a photometric output of 108 lumens, and can be independently controlled, transform and mixed ability to bring color, meet the design engineers to develop decoration, retail and wall lighting application design requirements.

3W three color Moonstone LED arranges three independent high power LED chips in one package, with a 120 degree angle and the smooth thin design, suitable for highly constrained, each chip package can withstand 350mA drive current, and each color can be independently driven and control, so that it can a desired color and the ability to bring up the color changes, SMT surface adhesion of these LED products with the standard reflow procedure compatible, can reduce the design cost, but also can bring a higher degree of freedom and flexibility of application design for lighting design engineer.

Accumulation of new LED lighting products to effectively solve the high power LED heat dissipation