LED drivers offer intelligent lighting control

Atmel Corp. has debuted a family of intelligent multistring LED drivers for the backlighting and solid state lighting (SSL) markets. The company claims that their comprehensive portfolio of Atmel LED drivers offer design engineers efficiency optimizer (EO) technology, flexible dimming options, scalability across wide range of power levels, user programmability and lower bill of material (BOM). These features are designed for rapidly growing LED applications in industrial, military and avionics displays, direct and edge-lit LCD TVs, PC monitors and other lighting sources in the commercial, residential, industrial and infrastructure market segments.

The LED drivers incorporate Atmel's patent-pending EO technology that is said to minimize power consumption to the lowest practical level. This technology allows designers to use any DC-to-DC or AC-to-DC converter topology with isolated or non-isolated implementation, while dynamically maintaining the highest system power efficiency by minimizing excess voltage across LED strings, Atmel said.

The drivers enable LCD TVs to achieve a 10M:1 dynamic contrast and the lowest motion-blur, according to the company. They also provide over 10,000:1 pulse-width modulation (PWM) dimming range for PC monitors and industrial displays. In SSL applications, the LED driver ICs and Atmel microcontrollers allow dynamic white-point setting, color-mixing and networked lighting with Zigbee, DALI and other standards. Other features include comprehensive fault management, LED aging and thermal control, programmability with the on-chip EEPROM and scalability to any number of LED strings with minimal DC-to-DC converters, Atmel added.

The multistring Atmel LED driver ICs are available in three categories including external MOSFET current sinks for high-power LED lighting and edge backlighting applications; internal MOSFET current sinks for direct backlighting and low-power LED lighting; and with integrated power controller for PC monitors and industrial, medical, military displays.

The Atmel multistring LED drivers are available for various drivers in the family range from $2.50 to $5 in 1,000-piece quantities.