Infineon BCR601: LED Controller Application for the New Power Over Ethernet (PoE) Standard in Smart Buildings

The IEEE Std 802.3bt-2018 Amendment 2 was recently ratified, adding power delivery using all four wire pairs in the structured wiring plant. This addition enables greater power being available to many more end devices like Smart LED lighting in Smart buildings. The building installations and how Smart buildings will be developed and used will necessitate such applications as new and more efficient power conversion architectures and LED driver solutions. Infineon is well placed to serve these needs immediately with fast time-to-market component solutions and tools, coupled with high reliability products for long-lasting solutions through Sourcengine. One such solution is the Infineon BCR601 LED controller.

Designers will have to consider which architectures would be best suited for Smart building architectures. Smart lighting is critical in maximizing employee performance and health. Efficient power solutions with optimum protective functions will lead to less maintenance to change/repair electronics in ceilings and elsewhere (this lowers maintenance and component costs). Proper LED drivers are a key part of this design to enable healthy employee working conditions.

Infineon has some excellent LED driver power converter solutions with constant voltage(CV) outputs using their CoolMOS power MOSFETs. Designers need to add a constant current source at that CV output to drive the LED strings. An LED controller would be perfect here.

A good choice here for a digital power, constant current LED controller, is the BCR601 with 8-60V supply range, and can use either NPN bipolar transistors or an N-channel MOSFET (The CoolMOS P7 is a good fit here) as the output power element to drive LED diode strings in Smart building ceilings.

The BCR601 has 100Hz/120Hz supply voltage ripple suppression, hot plug protection to minimize LED inrush current, overvoltage and overtemperature protection, as well as analog dimming and a resistor ‘R-set’ function to set the LED series current with multiple LED strings in the design. These features help make life easier for the circuit designer as well as allowing for flicker-free light and better lifetime of LEDs---more money savings.

The BCR601 LED constant current is also fully scalable enabling three percent analog dimming via a resistor or DC voltage at the MFIO pin.

Another feature of BCR601 is Active Headroom Control providing feedback to the primary side via an optocoupler to control the output voltage of the primary side converter. The integrated control loop minimizes the voltage overhead and power dissipation of the external driver transistor. This ability, coupled with the adjustment of voltage overhead by external configuration according to application needs, leads to an efficient LED design architecture.

Thus, the BCR601 is very well-suited, cost savings solution, for LED constant-current drivers.