LED architectural lighting requires a complete solution

With the use of various public buildings and commercial spaces, LED architectural lighting has shown a variety of features, and the proportion of using LED light sources has gradually increased. LEDinside had an exclusive interview with Mr. Yang Lichang, Chairman of Macroblock, Inc., asking him to talk about the development of drivers, controllers for LED architectural lighting, the latest market trends for LED displays, and the development of LED backlight driver products.

Introduction LED Drivers and Market Relationships

Chairman Yang Lichang stated that the Shanghai World Expo in China, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and the hosting of various large-scale events have led to significant growth in LED display screens and LED architectural lighting. The company’s current product shipments amount to 30 million units per month. In terms of shipments, LED display IC shipments account for 85% of the total, but its unit price decline is relatively high. It is a mature product and its proportion of revenue Only 80% of non-display IC revenue has come to 20%. Of the non-display ICs, half are drivers for architectural lighting, and the other half are drivers for general indoor lighting and LED backlighting.

The chairman of the board believes that LED architectural lighting is mainly used to receive architectural orders for various architectural lightings. Currently, it is stable and continues to grow. Lighting drivers are in the trend of more and more orders, especially LED bulbs. aspect. As a whole, several important requirements of LED have obvious growth, and the company is to provide a variety of LED application lighting manufacturers need weapons, that is, LED drivers, through which you can control the current drive, change the brightness of the LED Degree, RGB LED light color, as well as lighting, flashing time, in architectural lighting, LED display, LED backlighting applications, LED lighting is one of the important components.

LED architectural lighting is increasingly hot

The chairman takes the example of popular LED architectural lighting as an example to illustrate the development points of the LED driver in this field and the points of attention that need to be matched. He said that the LED driver products that have been put together to be used in LED architectural lighting applications need to be matched with driver circuit boards, controllers, signal conversion cards, and data receiver cards so that they can control the color of LED spotlights in architectural lighting. , Bright performance, to make a variety of customer needs lighting decoration or lighting effect.

In the collocation solution, the accumulation is in cooperation with ARC Solid-State Lighting, which is invested by the company, so that when the customer gets the product, there will be a ready-to-use system, which is very helpful for expanding the business opportunities. of. He also cited the case of Mediatek, which is a famous company. The company launched a consumer IC, and also used the design circuit board to provide it to customers, thereby expanding more markets and satisfying customers. The degree will also increase. Accumulation in this way can raise the bar for competition.

Jinxin added aggregators, and collaborated with automation equipment manufacturers. Through this team-based approach, system makers were allowed to pick up projects or projects for buildings, and then LED controllers and cooperative LED lamps were provided to manufacturers for construction.

At present, the market of LED architectural lighting is almost all marked, it is not easy to standardize, and the system architecture is also different. Therefore, manufacturers need to spend more efforts to deal with. In particular, LED architectural lighting is presented outdoors and needs to overcome the problems of waterproofing, hot swapping, and EMI. For example, he uses LED architectural lighting on the exterior wall of a building to prevent interference with other people's communications and EMI is required. The processing can not let other things interfere with the performance of LED architectural lighting sources and ICs. The stability of the product is very important, because if there is a problem after the construction is completed, it needs to be repaired and handled. Simply calling a crane to handle it will cost a lot of money and time, and it will not be possible for a small manufacturer.

In terms of the global LED construction market, the markets in mainland China and the Middle East will be relatively large. There will also be major cases in Europe and the United States. These markets have high quality requirements for LED architectural lighting, and both lighting design and environmental considerations are very important.

The company has received a case from the Guangzhou Asian Games in the Chinese mainland in 2010. In the white LED-driven part, it uses accumulated drivers.

LED indoor and outdoor lighting and LED street lights

As for the general LED lighting products, it is divided into two parts, one is a white LED and the other is an RGB LED. White LEDs are almost all standard products. Therefore, many AC to DC ICs are provided to customers. The power supply solutions for them should be accompanied by safety regulations. The use of RGB LEDs in commercial spaces, buildings, and signage is a lot, and replacing traditional neon lights is a trend in this market.
He also pointed out that the price pressure of the E27-size LED bulbs is increasing, and in the future it may be the same as the MR16 that has hundreds of millions of chips in the world one year. The price is becoming increasingly flat, and the market acceptance and shipment volume will be enlarged.

In addition, the technical difficulty of outdoor LED street lighting is relatively high. In this regard, it is necessary to solve the problem of heat dissipation and optics. Accumulation provides a solution to the power IC.

LED backlight ICs for LCD TVs are actively developed in cooperation with international manufacturers

Accumulation is now also cooperating with international companies. At present, LED backlight ICs are already in the design in phase. It is also necessary to make control boards to assist manufacturers and design many different versions for different customers. At present, Taiwan factories, as well as overseas Korean and Japanese manufacturers, as well as Chinese mainland manufacturers are all working together.

He took the Sharp of the Japanese factory as an example. The company has a direct-lit LED backlight LCD TV, which belongs to the form of RGB LED. This is a good part of accumulating, and the regional dimming is a future trend. At that time, the LED backlight driver's turnover will grow significantly.

The new trend of LED display is to match with buildings and commercial space

Finally, he mentioned a new trend in the collection of LED displays with the largest revenue sources, namely LED blinds. This is a semi-permeable LED display screen that can be used in commercial spaces with both lighting and display effects.

The driver required for the LED display screen will go with the trend of color correction, high refresh rate, and brightness correction.

The update frequency of LED display screens will increase, especially for concerts and sporting events, and more such high refresh rate products are needed. In addition, low power consumption, energy-saving design, cost-effectiveness, appearance flexibility, architectural aesthetics, and penetrating design will be the focus of future development. It is expected that there will be a wave of replacements for LED displays. (Editor: Green Light)