APEC 2012: Final Notes

Feb. 10, 2012
Flying home today, but two briefings before the bus left. First, breakfast with TI, This was focused discussion, at my request; I wanted to follow up on some things I had heard about flicker in LED lighting -- flicker caused by power-factor correction. Briefly, yes, it is an issue, and an interesting one. The concern is about flicker at low light-output levels, and its potential for causing seisures in susceptible individuals. Expect to read an on-line article about it in a month or so. There is potentially enough material for several articles on LED issues that go far beyond all those repetitive articles about driving backlighting and handling dimming with legacy triac dimmers. And finally, a good conversation with TE Circuit Protection about circuit protection -- electrostatic discharge and the kind of fault that devekops when a pass FET fails to a high resistance. In that case you get overheating, but at temperatures lower than solder-reflow temperatures. So you want to solder a device onto the board that will open when the FET fails, but you can't, because soldering it in place will activate it. What to do? I'll write that up as a blog soon.

Flying home today, but two briefings before the bus left.

First, breakfast with TI, This was focused discussion, at my request; I wanted to follow up on some things I had heard about flicker in LED lighting -- flicker caused by power-factor correction. Briefly, yes, it is an issue, and an interesting one. The concern is about flicker at low light-output levels, and its potential for causing seisures in susceptible individuals.

Expect to read an on-line article about it in a month or so. There is potentially enough material for several articles on LED issues that go far beyond all those repetitive articles about driving backlighting and handling dimming with legacy triac dimmers.

And finally, a good conversation with TE Circuit Protection about circuit protection -- electrostatic discharge and the kind of fault that devekops when a pass FET fails to a high resistance. In that case you get overheating, but at temperatures lower than solder-reflow temperatures. So you want to solder a device onto the board that will open when the FET fails, but you can't, because soldering it in place will activate it. What to do? I'll write that up as a blog soon.

About the Author

Don Tuite Blog

Don Tuite covers Analog and Power issues for Electronic Design’s magazine and website. He has a BSEE and an M.S in Technical Communication, and has worked for companies in aerospace, broadcasting, test equipment, semiconductors, publishing, and media relations, focusing on developing insights that link technology, business, and communications. Don is also a ham radio operator (NR7X), private pilot, and motorcycle rider, and he’s not half bad on the 5-string banjo.

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