A New Noncontact Method for the Prediction of Both Internal Thermal Resistance and Junction Temperature of White Light-Emitting Diodes

Although critical to the lifetime of LED, the junction temperature of LED cannot be measured easily. Based on the general photoelectrothermal theory for LED systems, the coefficient for the reduction of luminous efficacy with junction temperature is first related to the characteristic temperature of the LED. Then, a noncontact method for estimating the internal junction temperature T_j and junction-case thermal resistance R_jc of LED from the external power and luminous flux measurements is presented and verified practically. Since these external measurements can be obtained easily, the proposal provides a simple tool for checking T_j in new LED system designs without using expensive or sophisticated thermal monitoring equipment for the LED junctions. The proposed method has been checked with measurements on LED devices from three different brands with both constant and nonconstant R_jc. The theoretical predictions are found to be highly consistent with practical measurements.