Thermal Management of Visible LEDs

LEDs fulfill a growing number of applications. Visible LEDs have a high luminous efficacy as compared to incandescent and fluorescent bulbs – and while incandescent and fluorescent bulbs have already reached near-maximum luminous efficacy – the efficacy of visible LEDs is forecasted to increase in the future.

Typically, LEDs have been driven at a low power with a minimum power dissipation of 150 mW -- which meant that most lighting applications required numerous low-power LEDs.
The new high-power visible LEDs have power dissipations ranging from 500 milliwatts to as much as 10 watts in a single package. With improving luminous efficacy, these high-power LED components can and will replace other lighting technologies in most applications. When using high-power visible LEDs in applications, many design considerations must be considered. These include:

• How much luminous flux is required?
• What is the desired dominant wavelength or color
temperature?
• What is the required MTTF?
• How much flux degradation is tolerable?



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