Strategies to enhance LED lighting system reliability revealed

In order to create an energy-saving and efficient smart lighting system, the use of MCU and dimmable drivers for environmental sensing and high-efficiency dimming has become a popular design trend in today's LED lighting systems. In addition, optical and heat dissipation simulation is also an indispensable development link to ensure the reliability and safety of LED products.

Circuit design and system simulation are the two keys to realizing the success of LED intelligent lighting systems. If a microcontroller (MCU) is added to the circuit design, it can not only monitor the LED devices around the clock and report abnormal conditions in real time, but also control the lighting equipment in groups to adjust the energy, making the lighting system more intelligent. In order to enhance the stability of the LED light source , the dimmable driver is introduced into the circuit design, which can solve the problem of light source flickering and improve energy efficiency.

On the other hand, it is even more important to verify the feasibility of the product through the simulation process of optics and heat dissipation. This not only ensures product safety, but also accelerates the product development schedule and enhances market competitiveness during the simulation process.

MCU plays an important role in realizing smart lighting system

As the use of LEDs becomes more popular, their applications are becoming more diverse, and the business opportunities of smart lighting systems are even more anticipated by the industry. To build LED smart lighting systems, the introduction of MCU can realize functions such as automatic brightness adjustment, automatic color change, environmental sensing, and group system control, enriching the applicability of LED lighting and improving energy efficiency.

Zhu Dansen, a senior application engineer at Infineon, said that MCU can enable LED lamps to realize intelligent lighting systems, fully improve energy efficiency and enrich LED applications.

In the past, LED lamps lacked control and variation. Even though LEDs are more durable than traditional halogen lamps and incandescent lamps, their light output will still decline due to aging and temperature after long-term use, causing the electricity in the lamp to be easily damaged, greatly reducing reliability. The inability to dim the light also results in poor energy efficiency. The above factors ultimately shorten the life of LEDs. At the same time, the application will appear more monotonous and boring because the light cannot be changed.

Zhu Dansen further pointed out that in order to achieve the goals of dimming control, color change and efficient use of energy, the introduction of LED lamps into MCU can make indoor lighting, outdoor lighting, decorative lighting, and emergency lighting have more application changes, such as controlling LED lights to adjust the brightness according to different time periods during the day to save energy, or remote group control through the digital addressable lighting interface (DALI) in the MCU, and monitoring whether the LED device is still operating normally at any time to notify engineering personnel for quick maintenance. These new applications make LED lights no longer just on and off, but also have more flexible uses.

It is understood that Infineon has launched two MCUs, XC835 and XC836, to seize the LED smart lighting market. In addition to the number of pins and size, the biggest difference between these two MCUs is that XC836 supports DALI, which can be used for remote control of LED lamps and lanterns, while XC835 does not. In addition, both models can support touch control and have high heat resistance (150℃) and high reliability. At present, this series of MCUs is mainly used in small and medium-sized fluorescent tubes such as T4 and T8 and bulbs commonly seen in the entertainment decorative lighting market.

For the entertainment decorative lighting market, since entertainment performances are colorful, not only intelligent automatic dimming is important, but also the service life, luminous efficiency and light stability of LED lighting fixtures are also quite demanding. Therefore, dimmable drivers have begun to be designed into lighting systems to solve the above problems.

LED lighting competes in efficiency, dimmable drivers support

Governments around the world are increasingly demanding energy conservation, which has increased demand for dimmable LED lighting. To achieve high-efficiency dimming and solve the flicker problem, Texas Instruments (TI) recently released two highly integrated phase-dimmable AC-DC LED lighting drivers that can fully meet the dimming needs of retrofit bulbs, LED ballasts, downlights, spotlights and other lighting fixtures.

Xiao Yizhou, senior application engineer of analog product market development in Asia at Texas Instruments , said that LEDs with built - in adjustable optoelectronic source driver ICs will soon completely replace traditional dimmable light bulbs.