Intelligent lighting market heating LED driver / package design faces "great changes"

Yan Qingwei, an analyst at NPD DisplaySearch, believes that the demand for smart lighting systems in the Japanese and US markets is continuing to rise and will become the main target market for lighting companies in the future.

NPD DisplaySearch analyst Yan Qingwei said that North America, Japan and China are fully promoting energy-saving policies, and encouraging people and enterprises to replace LED lamps with subsidies, giving LED lighting new kinetic energy and accelerating the development of the entire industry. As the price of LED products approaches the traditional lighting scheme, the penetration rate is increasing day by day, and the more forward-looking concept of smart lighting has emerged. It has attracted lighting solutions suppliers such as Philips, OSRAM, Toshiba and Rambus. Launch a new product offensive.

However, in addition to the need to increase communication, sensing and intelligent automatic control functions, LED smart lighting is more important to be compatible with traditional lamps to avoid large changes in lighting systems and affect consumers' willingness to adopt, while reducing overall installation costs. . Yan Qingwei stressed that under the limitation of the size of the lighting system, LED driver chips and packagers have regarded the opto-integrated LED design with integrated driver circuit and light source as the layout focus, and developed new LED driver ICs, as well as DOB (Driver on Board) and COB (Chip on Board) and other packaging solutions.

According to the analysis of Philips' latest intelligent lighting solution, Hue, it is equipped with optoelectronic integrated design and combined with ZigBee, LED lights and mobile device applications to provide dimming and wireless network control functions. Spreading the list of the material list (BOM) of the hue, the LED light source and heat dissipation mechanism of the non-drive circuit only account for about 15%, and the drive circuit of the integrated communication and control scheme is as high as 75%. It is obvious that the drive circuit design will promote the development of smart lighting. The center of gravity.

It is reported that currently including Texas Instruments (TI), Fairchild and Dialog Semiconductor are working to develop LED driver ICs with low power consumption, small size and higher functional integration, and will be paired with ZigBee. Related control technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or Digital Addressable Interface (DALI). As for the LED packaging factory, it will invest in the DOB and COB production lines of high-power LEDs to directly integrate LED driver ICs, printed circuit boards and lamps to help system operators realize the optoelectronic integration architecture and meet the requirements of smart lighting systems.

In addition to communication and control, another important element of smart lighting is the sensing solution. Yan Qingwei revealed that many lighting manufacturers have incorporated sensing mechanisms such as micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), CMOS image sensors (CIS) and even gesture recognition into the design of smart lighting systems; Panasonic has also proposed LED optical communication. The concept, which can be combined with the mobile phone's Global Positioning System (GPS), provides innovative applications for indoor navigation, and is in the hope of another wave of huge smart lighting market opportunities.

Overall, the value of smart lighting will reach US$91 million in 2013, and will double in 2014 to between US$250 million and US$300 million. It will grow to US$1.471 billion in 2019. The scale has undoubtedly created a new blue ocean market for the LED lighting supply chain.