• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.292-300
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• 2009

This paper presents an LED BLU driving circuit with a local-dimming structure. The efficiency of the proposed LED driver has been improved by parallel driving 8 serial-connected LED arrays. It employed the soft-switching boost converter topology to reduce the switching power loss of the hard switching boost converter. Soft- and hard-switching converters have the same structure except that the free-wheeling diode in the hard-switching converter is replaced with the n-channel MOSFET in the soft-switching one. The proposed boost converter was compared with the hard switching converter. The soft-switching converter reveals superior ripple and efficiency. A smaller inductance can be used for the soft-switching converter contrasting to the hard-switching one. We also studied on an over-voltage protection circuit of the output of the driver at the no load condition. The protection circuit was applied to the proposed driver, and its operation was confirmed by experiment. Using a local-dimming technique, power consumption of LCD BLUs can be reduced as low as possible according to the brightness of its image.