Catalyst Semiconductor Offers Four-Channel Low Dropout Driver (LDD™) for Driving LEDs Directly from a Battery

Catalyst Semiconductor Offers Four-Channel Low Dropout Driver (LDD™) for Driving LEDs Directly from a Battery

Catalyst Semiconductor, Inc. a supplier of analog, mixed-signal and non-volatile memory semiconductors has announced the CAT4004, a new four-channel LDD™ (low dropout driver) designed for emerging, power-conscious portables where the LEDs are driven directly from the battery.

CAT4004 addresses migration of white LEDs to lower forward voltages

With the migration of white LEDs to lower forward voltages, a number of portable applications are now able to drive LEDs directly from the system battery without the need to boost voltage. The new CAT4004 is designed specifically to meet the needs of this emerging market requirement by achieving a low dropout voltage of 130mV, which maximizes LED performance as system battery voltage decays.

The CAT4004 LDD features tight current matching of +/-5 percent across a wide range of LED voltages. It also offers LED programming simplicity via Catalyst's one-wire EZDim™ interface, which allows output enable/disable and LED dimming control all from a single I/O on the system microcontroller. LED current can be controlled at six levels: 100 percent (full-scale brightness), 50 percent, 25 percent, 12.5 percent, 6 percent and 3 percent.