Fairchild's LED driver addresses customers' need for compact backlighting solution in portable designs

SAN JOSE, USA: Fairchild Semiconductor continues to meet customers’ needs for a compact, flexible solution that saves power while enabling more features in today’s battery-operated, portable electronics.

The FAN5341 is a highly efficient LED driver solution that improves brightness and resolution in portable designs, while offering 32 linear dimming steps and driving up to five white LEDs in series. By driving the LEDs in series this device ensures that all the LEDs used in applications such as mobile handsets, digital still cameras, GPS devices, MP3 players and other applications using small LCD displays have equal brightness.

This boost LED driver operates at 1.2MHz switching frequency, and integrates a Schottky diode to minimize the size of the external passive components and overall board space. With the FAN5341’s simple single-wire interface, a designer can easily control the brightness levels of the LEDs by transmitting digital pulses from the microcontroller to the FAN5341.

Since this lighting solution drives three to five LEDs in a series, the same current flows through each LED to ensure equal brightness. This LED driver also addresses space and power considerations in portable designs since it offers up to 83 percent efficiency, minimizing power consumption. The FAN5341 is assembled in a compact, low profile 2mm x 2mm UMLP package.

The FAN5341 is the newest addition to Fairchild’s portfolio of lighting solutions for portable applications. Fairchild continues to drive innovation in the lighting area by developing market-driven products that lower the overall solution cost, while providing excellent performance.