A Floating Buck Controlled Multi-Mode Dimmable LED Driver Using a Stacked NMOS Switch

A floating buck controlled multi-mode dimmable light-emitting diode (LED) driver that uses a stacked NMOS switch is presented, which reduces static operational current and eliminates auxiliary winding to simplify design and cost. The accuracy of the output current benefits from the use of a line-voltage compensation technique which can mitigate the effect of line-voltage fluctuation on current consistency. The proposed LED driver is implemented in 0.5 μm 5V/40 V backend 2P2M CMOS process and occupies a die size (with pads) of 1.17×0.84 mm². The experimental results show that the proposed LED driver achieves peak power efficiency of 95.4% across a wide range of input voltage from 85 to 264 Vac and a wide range of series-connected load LEDs from 11 to 27. The worst-case line regulation and load regulation of the output current are 0.28% and 0.25%, respectively. Measurements further show that the startup time is only 34.8 ms at 220 Vac with 50 Hz-input and multi-mode dimming can be easily implemented.