LED general lighting market will eliminate low-voltage LED chips

The LED general lighting market has whetted everyone's appetite and attracted so much attention today for the following three reasons: first, its market is large enough; second, the first year of the LED general lighting market will come at the end of this year or early next year, which means that the proportion of LED lighting fixtures in the total lighting fixtures will exceed 10%; third, unlike the incandescent lamp, fluorescent lamp and energy-saving lamp markets which are basically monopolized by a few suppliers such as GE, Philips and OSRAM, the LED lighting fixtures produced by these large lamp suppliers today only account for about 10% of the total lamp market, which means that the LED general lighting market is not a monopoly market yet, and everyone still has a chance to play in it.

However, most LED chip suppliers today are facing the danger of being eliminated, because the low-voltage LED chips they produce today will become increasingly difficult to sell into the LED general lighting market. Why? Because high-voltage LEDs have emerged, and high-voltage LEDs have two obvious competitive advantages over low-voltage LEDs:

First, at the same output power, the driving current required by high-voltage LEDs is much lower than that of low-voltage LEDs. For example, the forward voltage drop of Jingyuan Optoelectronics' high-voltage blue light 1W LED is as high as 50V, which means that it only needs 20mA driving current to output 1W power, while ordinary 1W LEDs with a forward voltage drop of 3V need 350mA driving current to output 1W power. Therefore, the power dissipated by high-voltage LEDs with the same output power during operation is much lower than that of low-voltage LEDs, which means that the cost of heat dissipation aluminum housing can be greatly reduced.

Second, high-voltage LEDs can significantly reduce AC-DC conversion efficiency losses. Taking 10W output power as an example, if a 1W high-voltage LED with a forward voltage drop of 50V is used, the output end can be configured with 2 parallel and 4 strings, and the forward voltage drop of the 4 series LEDs is 200V, which means that it is only necessary to use bridge rectification and drop 20V from the 220V AC mains. But if we use a 1W low-voltage LED with a forward voltage drop of 3V, even if 10 are connected in series, the forward voltage drop is only 30V, which means that it is necessary to drop the voltage from 220VAC mains to 30VDC. We know that the lower the input and output voltage difference, the higher the AC to DC conversion efficiency. It can be seen that if high-voltage LEDs are used, the efficiency of the transformer can be greatly improved, thereby greatly reducing the power loss during AC-DC conversion. This reduction in heat consumption can further reduce the cost of the heat dissipation housing.

Therefore, if high-voltage LEDs are used to develop LED general lighting products, the overall power consumption can be greatly reduced, thereby significantly reducing the design requirements for the heat dissipation housing. For example, we can use thinner and lighter aluminum housings to meet the heat dissipation needs of LED lamps. Since the cost of the heat dissipation aluminum housing is one of the main cost components of LED lighting fixtures, an effective reduction in the cost of the aluminum housing also means an effective reduction in the overall cost of LED lighting fixtures.

It can be seen that high-voltage LEDs can effectively reduce the cost and weight of LED lighting fixtures, but their more important significance is that they greatly reduce the design requirements for the heat dissipation system, thus effectively clearing the biggest technical barrier for LED lighting fixtures to enter the indoor lighting market. Therefore, high-voltage LEDs will dominate the future LED general lighting fixture market.