Market began to accept LED protection components in the next few years demand will increase

High power LED lighting applications need protection components

High power LED can provide incandescent lamp or CFL lamp can not provide long working life, low power consumption and low maintenance requirements, these factors make led more and more popular in outdoor applications. However, LED is a sensitive electronic component, which can easily be damaged by the transient overvoltage and overcurrent caused by the switch of the system, the electrostatic discharge and the nearby lightning. In addition, the switching power supply driven by LED does not provide transient overvoltage or overcurrent protection for inductive LED lighting electronic ballasts.

In order to meet the needs of high-power LED lighting applications, LED is usually designed to use 5 to 20 series, because the power of a single LED can not be done because of the heat problem. But the problem is that as long as any of the serial structure of a LED fault, the whole string of LED will be out of trouble. In the street lights or airport runway lighting applications, a string of LED failure may cause the overall brightness of the lights dimmed or completely black, leading to unimaginable security issues. In outdoor LED advertising display applications, which may produce white spots, and lead to revenue loss. In any of these applications, a series of LED failures often result in costly maintenance problems in outdoor applications.

In order to solve this problem, many vendors have launched LED protection devices of various sizes, such as Bourns, LittELfuse, TE (LITE) (formerly Tyco Electronics), A Morimi and Vishay.

The protection of the traditional LED mainly consider the lightning strike and the surge caused by the impact of ESD, as well as to prevent the damage caused by the positive and negative polarity of the power supply. But for high power LED used in outdoor lighting, also need to consider the LED string to work reliably and to reduce the maintenance cost, LED Bourns and its suppliers of element protection launched can fully meet all the above requirements. LED protection element can not only prevent lightning, surge, reverse connection, but also in the LED light string in the individual LED damage caused by open circuit, to ensure that other LED normal light.

LED protection component elements can also effectively protect the LED from near lightning and ESD discharge surge voltage / current source impact. In addition, the LED protection element contains a reverse current diode, which protects the LED string from the reverse polarity of the power supply.

The LED protection element is connected in parallel with each LED in the series. If a LED is open, the LED protection element connected to it will be switched on and the current should be guided by the fault LED to the LED protection element. This ensures that the other LED in the lamp string can work properly, so that only a single LED is extinguished, and the whole lamp string can still work normally, which greatly reduces the maintenance cost of the outdoor lighting.

In the case of not being switched on, the LED protection element only passes through the current of a few amperes, so it does not affect the whole circuit. In the trigger state, it will carry all the current of the lamp string and generate a voltage drop of about 1.3 volts.

The next six months will be a large power LED protection demand from the low production cost, high maintenance rate and high maintenance cost to low maintenance rate, high reliability, low maintenance cost and maintenance free period of change, is also the LED protection element is the key time to market acceptance and recognition.

Next six months is the key time for LED protection element

Bourns marketing director Kelly Casey said: LSP LED shunt protection components can provide a higher degree of reliability, it can protect power up to 3W LED. At present, more and more LED lighting designers began to recognize the benefits of such protection, is expected in the next few years the demand for LED shunt protection components will be greatly increased. Bourns currently provides four kinds of LSP components, are using a universal SMB package. Each series can provide bypass LED, 2, 3, or 4 LED functions for series. Since the four series are available, designers can optimize the level of protection of their products in terms of cost considerations. All of these series are suitable for working current between 75mA to 1000mA LED. Kelly Casey said that we are in the production of these semiconductor components in their own wafer fab, and therefore has great flexibility in manufacturing, can quickly meet customer needs. At this stage, the delivery time of LSP series is 16 to 20 weeks. Furthermore, for LED lighting design components, Bourns provides one-stop procurement services, including over voltage, over current and high temperature protection components, as well as for the power supply circuit inductance and current sensing resistors, etc.. The LSP series provides high reliability so that the Bourns LED product line is more complete. Lite (Littelfuse) distributor Shenzhen secomtel (SecomTel) Marketing Manager Guo Yu said, according to the different voltages, Netlon LED protection element products can be divided into 5 components, LED protection LED protection element 6, LED 9, LED protection element protection element 13, a total of 5 LED protection element 18 series, including the LED protection element 5 QFN and SOT-89 series offers two packages, other series are QFN and DO-214 package. Its elastic production mechanism is perfect, can well adapt to the demands of customers, the general standard for a period of 8 to 10 weeks. Guo Yu said: "the protection of components of LED LED protection devices industry is its only production of semiconductor structure, can provide a full range of protection for LED, and has the advantages of small volume, low heat, reliable work, high power LED protection products is highly cost-effective. "LED protection element uniqueness of the market is also considered using SCR and zener diodes for LED protection, but there are many different properties of these three protection elements, not a common swap products. See below for a comparison of the performance of the LED protection element with common SCR as well as Zener Diodes: 1) LED protection element