92.5% Average Power Efficiency Fully Integrated Floating Buck Quasi-Resonant LED Drivers Using GaN FETs

Abstract

LEDs are highly energy efficient and have substantially longer lifetimes compared to other existing lighting technologies. In order to facilitate the new generation of LED devices, approaches to improve power efficiency with increased integration level for lighting device should be analysed. This paper proposes a fully on-chip integrated LED driver design implemented using heterogeneous integration of gallium nitride (GaN) devices atop BCD circuits. The performance of the proposed design is then compared with the conventional fully on-board integration of power devices with the LED driver integrated circuit (IC). The experimental results confirm that the fully on-chip integrated LED driver achieves a consistently higher power efficiency value compared with the fully on-board design within the input voltage range of 4.5–5.5 V. The maximal percentage improvement in the efficiency of the on-chip solution compared with the on-board solution is 18%.