High-brightness LEDs continue to revolutionize the lighting industry with the added flexibility and intelligence they bring to lighting systems, including white light and colored light designs. These lighting systems give designers the ability to dynamically control color temperature while maintaining high CRI in white light applications. Alternatively, these systems can produce a broad spectrum of highly accurate colored light. While these two types of light appear very different, most intelligent lighting applications using LEDs are fundamentally built with a mixed-signal controller, constant current driver(s), and high-brightness LEDs. Multiple LED channels are used in both cases and thus all LED designs will need to deal with binning, temperature effects, aging, and overall color accuracy. Using a mixed-signal controller is a powerful way to intelligently address these issues while still achieving accurate white or colored light. For many lighting designers that are making the leap from legacy lighting (incandescent, fluorescent) to LED fixtures, using a mixed-signal controller is already a big challenge on its own.
This article discusses the similarities and differences between designing white light applications versus colored light applications, the challenges facing LED system design, and some powerful (even code-free) options available today for aiding designers in solving these issues. To read more, click the download link above or visit Planet Analog.
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