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This paper presents an LED driver circuit consisting of multiple linear current regulators and a voltage preregulator with adaptive output voltage. In the proposed driver, the output voltage of the preregulator is always self-adjusted so that the voltage across the linear current regulator of the LED string with the highest voltage drop is kept at the minimum value that is required to maintain the desired string current. Because the linear current regulators in this driver operate with the minimum voltages, the driver efficiency is maximized. The performance of the proposed driver was experimentally verified on a four-string LED setup with eight white LEDs in each string. The measured efficiency improvement of the linear current regulators was approximately 15% compared to the corresponding implementation with a constant preregulator voltage.
Hu et al. (Sat,) studied this question.