LED driver ICs offer 1W of power savings in LED boost circuit

Peregrine Semiconductor Corp., a Murata company, announces Arctic Sand’s new product family—the ARC3C family of LED driver ICs. The ARC3C product line targets the fast growing, ultra-high-definition (UHD) LCD displays market for notebook computers, Ultrabooks and 2-in-1 convertibles. The products deliver dramatic improvements in power conversion efficiency, while achieving the lowest “z” height profile and smallest footprint in the industry. Rated at up to 10W output power, the ARC3C products can save up to 1W of power in the LED boost circuit, improving battery runtime for a notebook computer by typically one hour.

“On the heels of last week’s acquisition, we hit the ground running and are excited to announce Arctic Sand’s ground-breaking new product family,” says Jim Cable, chairman and CTO of Peregrine Semiconductor and global R&D director at Murata Manufacturing. “The ARC3C family of LED boosts completes a range from Arctic Sand that can address everything from smartphones to high-end UHD notebook computers. It’s innovations like the ARC3C product family that get us one step closer to Murata’s vision of revolutionizing power electronics with the world’s smallest, most efficient power solutions.”

The ARC3C family of LED drivers has up to eight integrated programmable current sinks, integrates all MOSFETs, control and driver circuitry, and features state-of-the-art dimming options within a tiny 4×4 mm QFN package. The product family is designed specifically for 2-cell or 3-cell input voltages, with product variants suited up to 8-string LED arrays sinking current up to more than 40 mA per string. The ICs feature extensive fault protection including over-current, output over-voltage and under-voltage protection, LED open and uniquely short circuit protection. An I²C 6.0-compatible serial interface operating at up to 1 MHz is included, allowing extensive used programming, with settings stored in on-board non-volatile memory. The product family features best-in-class dimming capability including linear, logarithmic, analog, PWM, mixed-mode dimming or direct PWM dimming with up to 15-bit dimming resolution.

“The ARC3C family addresses the high-volume 2-cell and 3-cell notebook market for higher brightness UHD LCD displays—a segment that is rapidly moving to ultra-thin platforms that demand all day battery run times,” says Stephen Allen, director of strategic marketing at Peregrine Semiconductor. “Major OEMs have confirmed that Arctic Sand’s LED boost is the key to achieving these goals. In many customer benchmark tests, the ARC3C products have demonstrated a typical halving of losses compared with best-in-class competition. With Arctic Sand’s patented architecture, our efficiency advantage increases as platform profiles reduce.”

Arctic Sand ICs feature a patented “staged-pipeline” architecture that effectively reduces dependence on inductance, inherently lowers EMI and ripple and uniquely enables ultra-low profile solutions with industry-leading power conversion efficiency – addressing key pain points for mobile computing. Arctic Sand’s boost architecture delivers LED efficiency levels of greater than 94 percent peak at up to 45V output and with an input voltage range up to 15V.

The first three products in the family—the ARC3C0845, ARC3C0640 and ARC3C0445 LED drivers—are sampling in May.