Solid State Lighting http://dev.emcelettronica.

com/print/51707

Your Electronics Open Source

(http://dev.emcelettronica.com)
Home > Blog > allankliu's blog > Content

Solid State Lighting

By allankliu
Created 27/03/2008 - 03:22

BLOG LED

Foreword

As an electronics engineer, I used to despise the lighting industry. I considered it as a low-tech application. After some detail research on Internet, I change my mind. The lighting
is as complex as any others technologies. It is interesting, fantastic and a lot of companies invested heavily in lighting market.

Incandescent Light Bulb

Thomas Alva Edison was one of the greatest inventors. The light bulb was the brightest one among his inventions. Another great invention vacuum tube was also inspired from the
light bulb. The goal was only to provide a method of supplying the world with inexpensive, widely available commercial lighting. It was a great achievement, but some flaws were
revealed in coming centuries.

Incandescent light bulb has maintained the lowest cost than any other lighting technology. But part of the electrical energy has wasted in the form of heat, rather than light. Some
applications such as incubators and heaters are utilizing this feature of heating radiation, however incandescent light bulbs are being replaced in many occasions by CFL

1 di 9 30/04/2008 12.45
Solid State Lighting http://dev.emcelettronica.com/print/51707

(compact fluorescent lights) and HID (high-intensity discharge lamps) , which give more visible light for the same amount of electrical energy input. These alternative lighting
technologies are called as cold light source. Some jurisdictions are attempting to ban the use of incandescent light bulbs in favor of more energy-efficient lighting. Energy Star is a
United States government program to promote energy-efficient consumer products. This program covers a lot of products including lighting, monitors, PCs and TVs. And it tries to
convince consumers to replace incandescent light bulbs with CFL bulbs. Many governments in other countries also take some legal acts and deploy similar programs to take over
the incandescent lamp.

CFL (compact fluorescent light)

A fluorescent lamp or fluorescent tube is a gas-discharge lamp that uses very high voltage electricity to excite mercury vapor in argon
or neon gas, resulting in a plasma that produces short-wave ultraviolet light. This light then causes a phosphor to fluoresce, producing
visible light. Fluorescent lamps are more efficient than incandescent light bulbs of an equivalent brightness. This is because a greater
proportion of the power used is converted to usable light and a smaller proportion is converted to heat, allowing fluorescent lamps to
run cooler.

Unlike incandescent lamps, fluorescent lamps always require a ballast to regulate the flow of power through the lamp. Compact
fluorescent light bulbs may have a conventional ballast located in the fixture or they may have ballasts integrated in the bulbs, allowing
them to be used in lamp holders normally used for incandescent lamps.

Disadvantages

Some people find the color spectrum produced by some fluorescent lamps to be harsh and displeasing. A healthy person can
sometimes appear to have an unhealthy skin tone under fluorescent lighting. Actually I was shocked to see my blood vessel in some wired fluorescent light.

CFL bulbs contain small amounts of mercury, a neurotoxin, so far there no regulations to recycle the CFL bulbs to save the environment. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin, and it is
especially dangerous for children and fetuses. Most exposure to mercury comes from food chain, like eating fish contaminated with mercury.

Fluorescent lamps require a ballast to stabilize the lamp and to provide the initial striking voltage required to start the arc discharge. This increases the cost of fluorescent light
fixtures, though often one ballast is shared between two or more lamps. Electromagnetic ballasts with a minor fault can produce an audible humming or buzzing noise.

Fluorescent lamps are a non-linear load and generate harmonics on the 50 Hz or 60 Hz sinusoidal waveform of the electrical power supply. This can generate radio frequency
noise in some cases. Very good suppression is possible, but adds to the cost of the fluorescent fixtures.

Fluorescent lamps operate best around room temperature. At much lower or higher temperatures, efficiency decreases and at low temperatures (below freezing) standard lamps
may not start. Special lamps may be needed for reliable service outdoors in cold weather. Fluorescent lamps are very sensitive to humidity as well.

Fluorescent fittings using a magnetic mains frequency ballast do not give out a steady light; instead, they flicker (fluctuate in intensity) at twice the supply frequency. It can cause a
strobe effect posing a safety hazard in a workshop for example, where something spinning at just the right speed may appear stationary if illuminated solely by a fluorescent lamp.
It also causes problems for video recording as there can be a 'beat effect' between the periodic reading of a camera's sensor and the fluctuations in intensity of the fluorescent
lamp. When other devices that also flicker, such as CRT-based computer monitors, are operated under fluorescent lighting, the flicker may become much more noticeable.

Unless specifically designed and approved to accommodate dimming, most fluorescent light fixtures cannot be connected to a standard dimmer switch used for incandescent
lamps. Two effects are responsible for this: the wave shape of the voltage emitted by a standard phase-control dimmer interacts badly with many ballasts and it becomes difficult
to sustain an arc in the fluorescent tube at low power levels. Many installations require 4-pin fluorescent lamps and compatible controllers for successful fluorescent dimming;
these systems tend to keep the cathodes of the fluorescent tube fully heated even as the arc current is reduced, promoting easy thermionic emission of electrons into the arc
stream.

Cold-cathode fluorescent lamps are used as backlighting for LCD displays in personal computer and TV monitors. But
fluorescent lamps flicker has a major drawback for backlighting. The motion flicker is quite obvious because of the

2 di 9 30/04/2008 12.45
Solid State Lighting http://dev.emcelettronica.com/print/51707

flicker of backlighting, especially in large screen (of course it is much better than a 50/60Hz CRT TV). And imagine what
happens if these LCD displays are discarded finally. As a consumer, I really enjoy the vivid LCD HDTV (although I know
that the displayed color is an artificial color, the natural color is not so colorful. ) But It is not an environment-friendly
product. I know people who can disassembly LCD module and replace the CFLs inside. They are really genius.

LED

A LED lamp is a type of solid state lighting (SSL) that utilizes light-emitting diodes
(LEDs) as a source of illumination rather than electrical filaments or gas. The LED
lighting is an energy-efficient, environment-friendly, and fully digitalized technology.
And the LED lighting has more benefits: broad color spectrum, compact size, longer
operation life, fully dimmable, no IR/UV in beam and low voltage operation. We can
easily find LED lamp in traffic lights, automotive lights, bicycle lights, torches,
domestic lights, billboard displays, floodlighting of buildings, train lights, spot lights in
art galleries, backlighting in mobile phone, flash light in camera, and garden lights
with solar cell.

LED Applications

There are also some different ideas for LED applications.

For example, the award-winning LED illuminated Hansa Canyon tap. The LEDs are used to prompt the users for
water temperate with different colors. A bathtub follows this idea and win another design award.

Professor Masao Nakagawa from Japan Keio University invented the conception of visible light communication consortium. This idea is great for TMC (Traffic Management
Control).

3 di 9 30/04/2008 12.45
Solid State Lighting http://dev.emcelettronica.com/print/51707

FocusMedia installed a lot of outdoor LED advertisement players in the downtown area of Shanghai.

And OLED/AMOLED (Active Matrix/Organic Light Emitting Diode) is taking over the position of LCD panel. These
innovative designs are really amazing new applications for LED, but we only talk about LED lighting here.

The major applications for LED lighting are mobile phone, backlighting for LCD displays, car lamp, and domestic
lighting. In China, the LED lighting has already deployed in traffic lighting, outdoor public information billboard displays,
and architectural lighting.

LED Technologies

Not only the color of LED, but also the brightness of the LED is growing according to Moore's law. For many years LEDs
came in infra-red, red, orange, yellow, and green. Blue, cyan, and violet LEDs finally appeared in the 1990s. The blue
LED was the bottleneck, I still remember the old outdoor video LED displays were so wired, because there is no blue
LED in the display matrix. After the blue LED, the color spectrum is completed. After the blue LED, the white LED came
to out life.

To produce a white SSL device, a blue LED was needed. In 1993, Shuji Nakamura of Nichia Corporation came up with a blue LED using gallium nitride (GaN). With this invention,
it was now possible to create white light by combining the light of separate LEDs (red, green, and blue), or by placing a blue LED in a package with an internal light converting
phosphor. With the phosphor type, some of the blue output becomes either yellow or red and green with the result that the LED light emission appears white to the human eye.

To produce the white light necessary for SSL, light spanning the visible spectrum (red, green, and blue) must be generated in approximately correct proportions. To achieve this,
three approaches are used for generating white light with LEDs: wavelength conversion, color mixing, and most recently Homoepitaxial ZnSe.

1. Wavelength conversion involves converting some or all of the LED’s output into visible wavelengths. The methods include: Blue LED & yellow phosphor, Blue LED & several
phosphors, Ultraviolet (UV) LED & red, green, and blue phosphors and Blue LED & quantum dots.
2. Color mixing involves using multiple colors of LEDs in a lamp to produce white light. Such lamps contain a minimum of two LEDs (blue and yellow), but can also have three
(red, blue, and green) or four (red, blue, green, and yellow). As no phosphors are used, there is no energy lost in the conversion process, thereby exhibiting the potential for
higher efficiency. But the driver circuit is complex and cost is higher than other solutions.
3. Homoepitaxial ZnSe is a technology developed by Sumomito Electric where a LED is grown on a ZnSe substrate, which simultaneously produces blue light from the active
region and yellow emission from the substrate. The resulting white light has a wavelength spectrum on par with UV LEDs. No phosphors are used, resulting in a higher
efficiency white LED.

See? Different white SSL approaches are quite different. Therefore we might need different electronics and optical designs for them.

LED Lighting Design

The LED lighting costs more effort of designers. A complete design covers power conversion, control electronics, thermal management and optics. LEDs are low voltage devices,
the forward voltage of the LED varies from 2 to 4.5V, depends on the color and current. In addition LEDs demand constant current to ensure the intensity and color desired.
Designers must handle different power sources, including AC line, solor panel, 12V car battery, low voltage AC/DC supply, Alkaline, NiCd and Li-Ion battery cells. The topologic of
LED lambs are different. The LED requires protection diode to avoid one defective LED will not shut down the whole LED bar. And EMC issues of SMPS must be handled.
Anyway, different applications require tailor-made solutions and driver ICs.

Power Conversion

4 di 9 30/04/2008 12.45
Solid State Lighting http://dev.emcelettronica.com/print/51707

LEDs have very low dynamic resistance, with the same voltage drop for widely varying currents. Consequently they can not connect direct to most power sources without causing
self destruction. Current control ballast is normally used, which is used to offer constant current. Working on a nominal current also means longer operation life for a LED. A lot of
low cost LED lighting products use simple RC circuit, which shorten the lifecycle for LEDs. In state of art design of LED lighting, SMPS (switching mode power supply) is usually
used for a main supply. A lot of semiconductors suppliers have enough know-how in this area. They have already offered a lot of features, such as AC/DC conversion, DC/DC,
LDO, series or parallel LED configuration, current regulation, over-voltage protection, dimming, load-disconnect during shutdown, multiple multi-color control, white LED, single cell
power supply for LED, dot correction, PWM grayscale control, LED open detection, thermal error flag and thermal shut down protection.

Please check out application notes and datasheets from OnSemi, Fairchild, Micreal, TI, Maxim, IR, Micrel, and Zetex. You can get a lot of
information on power conversion/management in detail.

Control Electronics

Since LEDs are digital lighting sources can be switched on a very high frequency, their brightness can be dimmed individually. A lot of semiconductors have already integrated
power conversion and control electronics in one package. The color of the LED depends on the current. For white LED, if voltage changes, the color temperature changes as well.
So does the multiple-color LED. As a result, in order to adjust the intensity/brightness of a LED lighting system, you have to use PWM to adjust the duty cycle. If budget is allowed,
the LED lamps can even be addressed with some networking technologies. The conventional control technologies are used for lighting as well, from I2C, SPI, to LIN bus and
Zigbee wireless sensor networking.

Thermal Management

Designer had better to consider thermal management in housing, PCB layout and heat sinking material. Although LEDs are more energy efficient than CFLs, thermal management
is still very important to LEDs. Because LEDs are very small, if you overdrive too much current to LED dies, part of energy will be transformed via heat. And heat will kill LEDs or
shorten their lives. A good LED lighting design always considering thermal management. There are so many ICs integrated these features.

Optics

Because LEDs are spot light, while in most occasions, including domestic lighting where surface light source is required. Designers may be involved in geometrical optics, from
specific lenses, light guides to reflectors and combinations of these. Fortunately there are professional companies who focus on this area. Check out LEDIL in Finland.

Color Management

It is required to bring in color management for domestic lighting, LCD backlighting, and outdoor billboard video display. The white LED and the RGB LED mix approaches have
different requirements, I can not offer too much information. But I know designer must use total different ICs, and in some occasions, a color calibration equipment is required.
That is really professional domain for a lighting engineer.

Issues for LED Backlighting for LCD Panel

It is ironical. Compare the CCFL backlighting, the efficiency of LED backlighting for LCD displays is still lower. That leads to another issue, power consumption. Its cost is higher
(almost 4 times of CCFL, only SONY and Apple enjoy it), consistency of white light is worse. As a spot light source, LED requires more effort on design a well-distributed

5 di 9 30/04/2008 12.45
Solid State Lighting http://dev.emcelettronica.com/print/51707

backlighting. Finally as time goes by, LED backlighting also bring color offset. Besides those factors, LED also has problems of heat-sinking. The TVs and PC monitors have
different requirements on brightness and color spectrum. There are different solutions and technologies involved in the most competitive market, such as RGB backlighting, while
+ red supplementary backlighting, matrix and side backlighting, sensor network, sensing algorithm, LED protection and heat-sinking. Hoops!

Issues for LED Automotive Lighting

One car requires 300 LEDs, ranges from dash board, reading lamp, taillight, stoplight, turn signal light, headlight, and fog light to backlighting of navigation devices. So far, most of
European new cars are using LEDs for inter lighting. Over 80% of stoplights are installed with LEDs. The biggest challenge is headlight. The challenges come from legal issues
(some countries like Japan) and intensity and cost competition from HID (Xeon). Theoretically LED is much suitable for being used as headlight, because it is a spot light source,
and it is very easy to integrate Infrared and visual light communication together for fleet management and traffic control. We can anticipate that LEDs will take over most of the
automotive lighting applications as LED technology improved.

Issues for LED Domestic Lighting

If LED domestic lighting can take over CFLs in the market, the TAM (total available market) is about 100 B USD. But LED domestic lighting has some issues to be solved. As spot
light source, LED lighting is actually gaining the market share, like spot light in art galleries and torches. But CFLs as a surface light source are very strong in domestic lighting. If
LEDs lighting compete with CFLs in the form of LED matrix, then its cost, intensity and lighting efficiency is much lower than CFLs. Some applications demand full color spectrum,
the designers have to use blue LEDs with phosphor, then their energy efficiency is much lower than CFLs. We have to be patient and wait for a practical, low-cost white LEDs
technology for domestic lighting.

It is no doubt that LED lighting will dominate the future domestic lighting market. The concerns are just brightness and cost.

More

Another important issue is patent. Nichia has many essential patents for while LED worldwide. Other vendors also have many patents in LEDs. These suppliers exchange the
patent licenses. The other smaller suppliers have to sub-license from one of these vendors. It is important to get patent license before investing in LED lighting. On 2010, most of
the early patents for LED are about to be expired. We can expect much cheaper LED lighting products available on the market.

I saw an article from WSJ (Wall Street Journal) regarding LED lighting, the author bought LED neon for Christmas decoration. But after Christmas, he realized that the so-called
green lighting has a lot of problems. It still requires high maintenance cost, one defective LED will influence whole neon light. Anyway the author gave up the LED. That article
reflects the fact of LED lighting, nothing is perfect.

After all, different lighting technologies are suitable for different applications.

LED & IC Suppliers

http://www.lumination.com/ [1]
GE/GELcore, formerly JV of GE and Emcore, now a subsidary of GE, renamed as lumination.

6 di 9 30/04/2008 12.45
Solid State Lighting http://dev.emcelettronica.com/print/51707

http://www.lumileds.com/ [2]
Philips Lumileds, formerly JV of Philips and HP/Angilent, now a subsidary of Philips.

http://www.nichia.com/ [3]
Nichia, first inventor of while LED based upon blue LED.

http://www.toyoda-gosei.com/ [4]
Toyata Gosei, strong in automotive LED lighting.

http://www.cree.com/ [5]
CREE, white LED lamp.

http://www.tn-sanso.co.jp/en/ [6]
Taiyo Nippon Sanso Corp.

http://www.osram-os.com/ [7]
OSRAM, strong in automotive LED lighting in European automotive.

http://www.avagotech.com/led [8]
Avago, LED supplier.

http://www.exar.com/Common/Content/Product.aspx?Parent=2&ID=116#19 [9]
Exar

http://www.fairchildsemi.com/markets/lighting/ [10]
Fairchild sold LED business to Everlight, but it keeps a lot of discrete components and driver ICs for lighting, from LFL/CFL/HID and LED.

http://www.maxim-ic.com/appnotes.cfm/an_pk/828 [11]
Maxim, offers LED driver ICs.

http://www.micrel.com/page.do?page=product-info/led_drivers.shtml [12]
Micrel, driver ICs.

http://www.onsemi.com/PowerSolutions/parametrics.do?id=197 [13]
OnSemi, discrete components and driver ICs for lighting. NCP1200 supports direct main supply connections.

http://www.seoulsemicon.com/ [14]
Seoulsemicon, focuses on LED lighting.

http://www.shamrock.com.tw [15]
Taiwan Shamrock Micro Device, offers SD802, a full featured, operates on high voltage AC and low voltage DC universal high brightness LED driver.

http://www.ti.com/lighting [16]
TI, LED lighting drivers. Most of its LED drivers are dedicated for mobile devices.

http://www.zetex.com/3.0/categories.asp?top=3&curr=3 [17]
Zetex, another suppliers for LED.

http://www.ledil.fi/ [18]

7 di 9 30/04/2008 12.45
Solid State Lighting http://dev.emcelettronica.com/print/51707

LEDIL LED Lens. For most of the power LEDs being sold in the world, LEDIL can offer a standard plastic lens solution giving a variety of illumination patterns, e.g. spot, medium,
wide, oval or side emitting type of lenses. Lens size varies from micro lenses being a few millimeters to large collimetors.

http://www.semiapps.com/APPS/System%20Functions/Power%20Management/Light... [19]
This site offers a lot of turnkey solutions from semiconductor companies and design houses. Lighting is included as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lighting [20]
Wikepedia page about Lighting.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7431198 [21]
NPR, National Public Radio Web site for CFL issues.

http://k-ris.keio.ac.jp/Profiles/0170/0005590/prof_e.html [22]
Profile of Pr. Nakagawa Masao in Keio University. I can not find its visual light communication on LED. You can contact him directly if you are interested in this topic.

http://it.farnell.com/jsp/bespoke/bespoke7.jsp?bespokepage=farnell/en/ed... [23]
Farnell is one of the world's largest catalogue distributors of electronic components and industrial products including capacitors, transistors, resistors, etc

Trademarks

Source URL: http://dev.emcelettronica.com/solid-state-lighting

Links:
[1] http://www.lumination.com/
[2] http://www.lumileds.com/
[3] http://www.nichia.com/
[4] http://www.toyoda-gosei.com/
[5] http://www.cree.com/
[6] http://www.tn-sanso.co.jp/en/
[7] http://www.osram-os.com/
[8] http://www.avagotech.com/led
[9] http://www.exar.com/Common/Content/Product.aspx?Parent=2&ID=116#19
[10] http://www.fairchildsemi.com/markets/lighting/
[11] http://www.maxim-ic.com/appnotes.cfm/an_pk/828
[12] http://www.micrel.com/page.do?page=product-info/led_drivers.shtml
[13] http://www.onsemi.com/PowerSolutions/parametrics.do?id=197
[14] http://www.seoulsemicon.com/
[15] http://www.shamrock.com.tw
[16] http://www.ti.com/lighting
[17] http://www.zetex.com/3.0/categories.asp?top=3&curr=3
[18] http://www.ledil.fi/
[19] http://www.semiapps.com/APPS/System Functions/Power Management/Lighting

8 di 9 30/04/2008 12.45
Solid State Lighting http://dev.emcelettronica.com/print/51707

[20] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lighting
[21] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7431198
[22] http://k-ris.keio.ac.jp/Profiles/0170/0005590/prof_e.html
[23] http://it.farnell.com/jsp/bespoke/bespoke7.jsp?bespokepage=farnell/en/ed_world/tech_first/energy/categories/solid-state-illumination.jsp

9 di 9 30/04/2008 12.45