A technique for improving the precision of the direct measurement of junction temperature in power light-emitting diodes

Extending the lifetime of power light-emitting diodes (LEDs) is achievable if proper control methods are implemented to reduce the side effects of an excessive junction temperature, TJ. The accuracy of state-of-the-art LED junction temperature monitoring techniques is negatively affected by several factors, such as the use of external sensors, calibration procedures, devices aging, and technological diversity among samples with the same part number. Here, a novel method is proposed, indeed based on the well-known technique consisting in tracking the LED forward voltage drop when a fixed forward current is imposed but exploiting the voltage variation with respect to room temperature. This method, which limits the effects of sample heterogeneity, is applied to a set of ten commercial devices. The method led to an effective reduction of the measurement error, which was below 1 °C.