Low Cost High Performance LED Driver Based on a Self-Oscillating Boost Converter

In this paper, a self-oscillating boost converter with a blocking diode is proposed to meet the desire for simple, cost-effective, high performance, and highly efficient LED drivers. As compared with traditional self-oscillating converters, the proposed converter demonstrates several appealing advantages including design simplicity, robustness, soft-switching characteristics (zero-voltage switching and zero-current switching), tight current regulation, and high efficiency over a wide line/load range. The control stage is implemented with a compact and low-cost industry standard controller, which assumes multiple roles in switching and LED current regulation. A type III compensator with anti-windup is designed to limit the maximum LED current at startup and to achieve tight LED current regulation at steady state. The efficiency and desired transient/steady-state performances are verified with SPICE simulation and a prototype circuit, which demonstrate a maximum efficiency of 95.9% and 2.3% ripple factor for the LED current. The robustness of the proposed driver is verified under a range of power supply voltage and different numbers of LEDs at the load side. In addition, the circuit is modified to implement high efficiency pulsewidth modulation dimming between 5% and 95%.