December 6, 2021

Problem

The customer supplies LED lighting products to the industrial and commercial markets and was looking for innovative solutions to meet high reliability requirements. Their current solution was to have separate modules for the LED driver from the LED board. This allows for swapping out the drivers when they fail (they are the first module to fail in the field). They were looking for a solution that would provide long life and not require a separate driver module.

Solution

iSine delivers an AC LED Driver IC that drives the lamps directly from the AC line. The other design method is a separate module that converts the AC line voltage into a DC voltage to drive the LED boards. The conversion module requires Electrolytic Capacitors to perform the conversion from AC to DC. Unfortunately, the Electrolytic Capacitors have a lifetime of 5 years or less (much less when exposed to heat). The iSine AC LED Driver IC solution does not require any capacitors and therefore can provide a much longer lifetime for the entire light fixture.

The customer worked with iSine to design boards using the iSine AC LED Driver to supply drive to the LEDs on the same board. No extra drive module is required, saving size and cost. The connectors between the driver board and LED board was eliminated (removing another cost and high-failure connectors). The Electrolytic Capacitors were eliminated, removing that high-failure component.

Results

The result is a lower cost, smaller footprint fixture with a higher reliability. The smaller size was a result of having the driver on the same board as the LEDs. No drive module (and connectors) were needed. The customer has been shipping products using the iSine AC LED Driver for many years and have been able to sell them at a lower cost with a 10 year warranty.

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