SSL Luminaire with Novel Driver Architecture

Abstract

Cree has developed a new high-efficiency light emitting diode (LED) technology platform capable of providing low-cost, high performance luminaires that can be adopted across a variety of SSL applications. This development is built on Cree’s high brightness LED platform to design a novel LED chip that enables a high-efficiency driver architecture to improve the overall luminaire system efficacy. These system efficiency gains were realized using an integrated approach tailoring the LED chip characteristics to allow for the high-efficiency driver technology platform. The reliability of the new LED design was robust at the component level under accelerated testing conditions. Luminaires were assembled integrating the novel LED and driver technology to demonstrate the system improvement. Cree has successfully completed this project by developing a novel LED architecture that enables a new driver design with 93% efficiency. This technology was showcased in an LED luminaire that produced 725 lumens at an efficacy of 87.4 lumens per watt (LPW). The correlated color temperature (CCT) of the luminaire was 2708 K with a color rendering index (CRI) of 91. The novel LEDs and driver led to a 9% system performance improvement compared to the standard LEDs and driver scheme.