Easily scale power & create smart LED-based lighting

Gaurang Shah, Senior Vice President, Power Systems Business Group, Fairchild Semiconductor, commented: “Our FL77944 LED Direct AC Drive is a superior solution for solid-state LED lighting systems compared to expensive light engines based on SMPS technology. The FL77944 is a cost-effective IC with everything manufacturers need for smart LED lighting products so they can accelerate time-to-market and focus on differentiating features, rather than spending precious time cobbling together disparate components.”

The IC has all the important dimming capabilities required for smart lighting products, including phase-cut dimming as well as analogue and PWM dimming, which is also key for wirelessly connected lighting.

The FL77944’s ability to scale to support higher power applications up to 120W by wiring products in parallel is a critical feature. This reduces the number of different ICs that manufacturers need to keep in inventory. It can also eliminate the need for electrolytic caps, transformers and inductance coils. This reduces both the BOM costs and the overall complexity compared to designs using SMPS.

The LED lighting IC enables designers to reduce their board space requirements by locating the controller IC on the same PCBs as the LEDs and by eliminating the need for electrolytic caps, transformers and inductance coils. Products based on the FL77944 should be more reliable and last longer than SMPS-based products as there are inherently fewer points of failure. In particular, eliminating the need for electrolytic capacitors should improve reliability as they are a common source of failures in SMPS-based products.

The FL77944 is available now along with the FEBFL77944 evaluation board.