This reference design plays a pivotal role in helping manufacturers quickly respond to this demand, significantly reducing R&D cycles, cutting operational costs, and streamlining product development.
The Street Light Smart LED Driver Reference Design from Microchip offers a highly adaptable and cost-effective solution for developing efficient LED drivers tailored for smart lighting applications. This design is intended to support intra-luminaire connectivity in compliance with industry standards, enabling manufacturers to create lighting systems that are both intelligent and energy-efficient. With increasing global demand for sustainable infrastructure, especially in municipal environments, the street lighting market is witnessing rapid growth.
One of the most valuable features of this reference design is its customizability. Unlike fixed-function, off-the-shelf products, this solution allows manufacturers to tailor the LED driver to meet specific project or municipal tender requirements. This flexibility ensures that products can be adapted for a wide variety of use cases while meeting local regulations and standards, enhancing competitiveness and marketability. Additionally, a complete smart street lighting system demo is available, which includes the LED driver, smart street light controller, and support for widely adopted software protocols, offering a comprehensive starting point for product development.
From a technical standpoint, the reference design supports an output power of up to 100W and operates across an input voltage range of 190 to 265V AC. It is compliant with the D4I control method and achieves a high power factor of 0.99 at 230V AC with 100W output. The system includes both analog (linear) dimming, allowing a wide range of LED current control, and PWM digital dimming, which can dim down to 0.01% brightness with pulse widths as short as 150 ns.
The design leverages a flyback converter for efficient automatic output voltage adjustment and a boost converter that minimizes output ripple, ensuring smooth LED current. Robust protection mechanisms are also incorporated, including undervoltage and overvoltage detection, fault recovery with auto-retry, and overcurrent detection of the load switch. Targeted application areas include street lighting, parking area lighting, and industrial lighting. Hardware design files are readily available, while firmware and software are provided under NDA to qualified clients and prospects.
The reference design integrates key components to deliver a compact and efficient smart street lighting solution. The MCP1792 provides high-input voltage regulation for automotive-grade reliability, while the ATSAMD21E18 microcontroller, with 256KB Flash and 32KB RAM, offers low-power processing for smart control. The MCP1012 supports efficient isolated power conversion, and the HV96001 enables precise LED modulation with advanced PWM and analog dimming. For dependable data storage, the 47L16 combines SRAM speed with EEPROM non-volatility, ensuring reliable, high-endurance memory performance.
Microchip Technology has tested this reference design. It comes with a bill of materials (BOM), schematics, assembly drawing, printed circuit board (PCB) layout, and more. The company’s website has additional data about the reference design. To read more about this reference design, click here.
