A Comparative Study of the Lifetimes of High-End and Low-Cost Off-Line LED Drivers Under Accelerated Test Conditions

This work presents a comparative study between a set of high-end, name-brand LED off-line drivers and a second set of low-cost drivers. To determine the lifetime of the devices in each sample an accelerated lifetime test was used. The degradation of important parameters of the devices during the test, as well as their lifetime, were recorded. A failure analysis reveals two important failure causes: galvanic corrosion and failed metallized film capacitors. Galvanic corrosion is found to be more frequent in the sample of low-cost devices. It is proposed that this is due to lack of proper cleaning of the assembled circuit board. Finally, the question whether the high-end sample has a significantly longer lifetime compared to the low-cost sample is assessed through a proper statistical test. A higher mean lifetime for the high-end sample cannot be confirmed.