Temperature Compensation to give your LED “intelligent”Temperature Protection.pdfVIP

SN-EN TECH Temperature Compensation to give your LED “Intelligent” Temperature Protection LEDs can be a long lifetime lighting source. Theoretically its lifetime can reach 100,000 hours. However, an LEDs lifetime is strongly related to its junction temperature (figure 1). As the junction temperature is increased from 115 ℃ to 135 ℃, its lifetime is decreased from 50,000 to 20,000 hours. Additionally,the quality of the luminous output will also have a faster rate of decline. Figure 1 Most LED drive ICs have a thermal shutdown to protect the IC, but no protection for the LED. Some LED lighting products use NTC (Negative Temperature Coefficient) thermistors to sense the temperature of the LED, and then control the LED current with a MCU. This can solve the problem, but is a high cost solution. 1 SI-EN TECH SN-EN TECH Figure 2 It is common practice to limit the LED current to the safe region below the red line(figure 2,typical LED I-T curve). If the LED current exceeds the safe value for any given temperature, i.e. goes beyond the red line, its temperature will rise, shortening its lifetime or even permanently damaging or destroying the LED. Si-Ens SN3352 provides a simple and effective solution to this problem by integrating a temperature compensation function. The SN3352 solution is shown in figure 3-1. As the figure shows, the temperature compensation curve is user defined by resistors R1 and R3, and NTC thermistor R2. When the LED(s) temper