A DOB driver is an LED lighting system (Widely used in SMD, COB, LED bulb, LED flood light, LED downlight and other LED lamps) that incorporates a light engine with an integrated on-board driver.
DOB driver is short for “driver-on-board”or Driverless.
What we usually call “de-drivering” is actually not no driver.
But a new driving method that is different from traditional switching driver supplies.
It is a new driving method derived from the characteristics of LEDs.
The DOB driver solution has many pioneers in the industry.
There are mainly Seoul Semiconductor, LynkLabs of the United Kingdom, Texas Instruments of the United States, Exclara, and giants such as the Industrial Technology Research Institute and Interlight in Taiwan.
However, China started late, due to the lack of research and development reserves in China, and the response speed was slow. In the whole DOB driver system, the most important thing is the IC.
However, China’s development is rapid, and now a group of companies have followed the pace and developed DOB ICs.
For example: RM, BP, PT and SM ……
However, the rejection or even suppression of “no driver” products has hindered the development of this innovative new technology to a certain extent.
The difference between DOB driver and traditional driver：
In conventional LED lighting systems the driver is typically separated from the LED assembly and fabricated on an FR4 printed circuit board (PCB).
This configuration is based on the consideration that LED drivers have been dominantly designed as switching mode power supplies.
SMPS drivers typically make use of bulky, expensive and unreliable reactive components such as inductors and capacitors.
The use of reactive components necessitates a dedicated FR4 board which provide adequate routing layers for component interconnects.
In an integrated lighting system, the considerable volume of a typical SMPS driver creates a need for an adequate space within the lighting system in order to accommodate the driver circuit.
Furthermore, reactive components such as electrolytic capacitors are temperature sensitive.
Remote mounting can alleviate these components of thermal stresses otherwise imposed by the LEDs.
A DOB lighting system uses only solid state driver components which are available in surface-mount packages capable of being assembled on circuit boards with a single-sided copper construction.
So the DOB driver can be installed in smaller lamps. For example: LED bulbs, DOB flood light, etc.
This makes it possible to mount driver components a metal-core printed circuit board (MCPCB) where LEDs are mounted.
Typically, the driver is designed as a linear power supply.
Since there is no high frequency switching, electromagnetic interference (EMI) is practically absent in linear power supplies.
The complete absence of EMI radiation allows linear power supplies to be designed with a significantly reduced parts count.
The small circuit parts count and small form factor of circuit components contribute a small footprint of the driver, which introduces minimal impact on the LED assembly when it comes to photometric performance.
The drive current is regulated by small driver ICs without using electrolytic capacitors.
The weakest component with the shortest life expectancy determines the life of the driver.
The removal of electrolytic capacitors translates to significantly improved driver reliability.
To sum up, we can conclude 2 points:
1) Simplified
Because there are many components in the traditional drive, the bad factor will naturally increase.
In particular, the life of electrolytic capacitors directly leads to an increase in the probability of failure of LED lamps.
Although capacitor electrolysis is used in DOB driver in order to eliminate 100Hz stroboscopic, the application of these capacitor electrolysis in DOB drive is essentially different from that of traditional drive capacitor electrolysis.
That is, the electrolytic failure of the capacitor driven by the DOB will not cause the overall damage of the LED lamp. However, the failure of capacitor electrolysis in the traditional drive directly causes the LED lamp to not work.
2) Scale
There are many components in traditional drives, which are large in size and cumbersome in the production process. This brings inconvenience to standardization, automation, and large-scale production.
According to incomplete statistics, there are no less than 20,000 LED lighting companies in China at present.
It is understood that in the next 5-10 years, tens of thousands of related enterprises will be added.
To survive in this brutal competition, improving production efficiency and speeding up the degree of automation will be the only way.
