Atmel LED Drivers Offer Intelligent Control for Solid State Lighting

Atmel Corp. has launched a new family of intelligent multi-string LED drivers for the backlighting and solid state lighting markets. The LED drivers incorporate Atmel’s patent-pending efficiency optimizer technology that minimizes 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.

The Atmel drivers enable LCD TVs to achieve an ultra-high 10M:1 dynamic contrast and the lowest motion-blur. The new drivers also provide over 10000:1 pulse-width modulation (PWM) dimming range for PC monitors and industrial displays. In solid state lighting applications, the new 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, and programmability with the on-chip EEPROM and scalability to any number of LED strings with minimal DC-to-DC converters.

The multi-string 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.

Atmel