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In ten years time the LED market will be bigger than the DRAM market leading to huge demand for LED driver ICs, according to Hans Rohrer, CEO of Zetex.“Twenty per cent of the world’s energy gets wasted by inefficient light creation,” Rohrer told Electronics Weekly. “If the world moved to LED this wastage could go down to five, six or seven per cent.”The technology required for LED driver ICs is analogue bipolar which is a European speciality. 

“You need to draw LED current very carefully,” said Rohrer.“It needs to be controlled very well. That is an analogue domain. The old Ferranti and Plessey bipolar processes can go down to voltage levels you can’t do with CMOS with great stability and accuracy.”Zetex inherited the Ferranti process technologies when it was split off from Ferranti Semiconductors in the 1980s.Hans Rohrer“Europe does more bipolar designs than the rest of the world put together,” said Rohrer.The move of LED into the mainstream lighting market is expected because of the potential savings in power generation which the more efficient LED has over traditional methods of light creation.

“Twenty per cent of the world’s energy consumption represents the output of around 5,000 huge power stations or 10,000 sizeable power stations,” said Rohrer.Zetex’s LED boost and buck driver ICs are known for efficiency and versatility with simple changes in external components allowing a wide variety of applications to be addressed.

The automotive market is expected to go for LEDs in a major way because of their efficiency, and if cars used LEDs, it would have a significant impact on the world’s fuel usage.“If every car, instead of using current lighting systems, used LEDs, then the world would save seven days of fuel consumption,” said Rohrer.

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