A New Current Mirror Balancing Circuit for AC-LED Lighting

This paper proposes a new current balancing method for alternating current (AC) - light emitting diodes (LED). The proposed method uses the bi-directional current mirror circuit with negative feedback that consists of two reference currents, n+1 NPN transistors, n+1 PNP transistors, and 2(n+1) resistors for n pairs of anti-parallel LED strings. It can balance the LED currents in multiple AC-LED strings regardless of the polarity of the AC source while reducing the differences in LED currents caused by the early effect. In addition, the proposed circuit can achieve LED current balancing even in the variations of parameters among the transistors due to the negative feedback operation. Simulations and experiments were performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed circuit. The balancing operation of the proposed circuit was simulated at low (50/60 Hz) and high (60 kHz) frequencies. In addition, open/short protection, power factor, and efficiency of an LED driver using the proposed circuit were analyzed and compared with a basic mirror circuit. For the experiments, a prototype was built and tested for 5W LED lighting consisting of three pairs of anti-parallel LED strings. The maximum LED current difference Δi
_LED
was reduced from 45 mA to 4 mA by the balancing operation of the proposed circuit.