Differentiating Your LED Design

Many have little experience with electronics, being more familiar with standard florescent and incandescent bulbs. The literally million dollar question for these companies becomes how to set their lighting design apart from all the other competitors out there.

Currently, when most lighting customers think about differentiation, they think about using color LEDs for mixing light. These RGB, RGBA, etc. applications fit an interesting niche in both architectural and stage lighting designs.

 However, a lack of imagination has gripped the market in terms of taking many of these same principles and attacking the substantially larger White Light market.

Most engineers are currently creating "me-too" white light designs by taking "x" number of white LEDs from a manufacturer such as Lumileds, adding up the lumens to equal or surpass that of a fluorescent, hooking it up to a ballast, and calling it good. This does not appear to be a recipe for long-term success.

There are few technological advances that stop at the replacement level, and as customers gain a new perspective on the additional features of LEDs, it would be unfortunate to assume that there would be no further utilization.

This article will explore several examples of differentiating what appears at face value to be a simple LED design. Each of these examples deserves far more space than can be devoted to here, but should serve as a starting point for additional creativity.

The key to this step is the addition of basic intelligence to the circuit, generally in the form of a microcontroller. Intelligence is necessary to take advantage of what LEDs offer as much to white light designs as to color.

Tune to Temperature
The first example of a key differentiating feature is the ability to tune color temperature along the black body locus. It is relatively simple to imagine why one wants to mix color, and still there has yet to be substantial progress made towards the same principles with white light.

As lighting customers become more discerning, the option of any specific color temperature between 3000K and 6500K is appealing. This also means that designers can maintain a single white light fixture design that avoids the need for constant revision dependent on a Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) specification.

What is interesting to note about tuning white light is that it actually is normally done through mixing color LEDs. This originally was done with a simple RGB interface, but designers quickly noticed that the Color Rendering Index (CRI) was extremely poor.

CRI is important in order to reproduce an item's color as it would be under natural light, especially vital in such applications as display lighting. A merchant doesn't want good jewelry looking bland.

To alleviate this concern, designers have tried RGBA, RGGB, and RGBW, and each configuration has their advocates. Intelligence can ensure that whatever LED configuration a designer selects will have the best possible CRI by calculating the dimming percentages required to drive the LEDs efficiently. Companies such as Future Electronics have done excellent work in assisting designers with this often difficult process.

Even if a high CRI is not a top design requirement, some sort of simple tuning can be beneficial, this time only with two strings of white LEDs, cool and warm white. This approach can provide the same number of lumens while also allowing the designer an easy way to differentiate the product, especially from standard fluorescent bulbs.