Junction Temperature Estimation for High Power Light-Emitting Diodes

The understanding of the thermal properties of a high power LEDs is essential in order to achieve the highest optical performance of the device without sacrificing its reliability. In addition to that, the good thermal management is also a key factor to avoid thermal induced variation of the photometric / colorimetric properties of power LEDs, such as variation of relative light output or the spectrum. This paper proposes a methodology to estimate junction temperature of high power LEDs. This method allows discarding the influence of the intrinsic series resistance of the LED electric model in 1-V curve, avoiding, as a consequence measurement errors.