Wireless devices such as smartphones and tablets are becoming the lifeline for most people. Ensuring that this lifeline has power when needed is a major concern. System designers therefore look at every aspect to minimize power loss. To help realize that every device matters, we will look at the Schottky diode in the boost converter for the LED backlight.
In this application the voltage of the battery is boosted to the voltage needed to drive the LEDs at 20 mA per string for the backlight. The power used in this application depends heavily on the configuration of the LEDs. Typically this LED configuration is two strings of six LEDs. Other important parameters are the inductor and the switching frequency. To minimize the total board area of this solution it is ideal to use a high frequency which will allow a smaller inductor to be used. For our purpose we will use a switching frequency of 1.2 MHz and a 4.7 µH inductor.
For the diode selection we will compare two popular Schottky diodes used for this application, NSR0340P2 and NSR05F40NX. The NSR0340P2 is a low VF Schottky diode housed in a SOD-923 package. The NSR05F40NX is a DSN2 Schottky diode that is the equivalent size of the SOD-923 package. With the setup described the resulting power loss of the NSR0340P2 is 26.1 mW while the NSR05F40NX only dissipates 17.0 mW. This is compared to a total system output power of 768 mW. We will assume that the rest of the system has an efficiency of 90%. With this taken into account the overall system with the NSR0340P2 will have an efficiency of 87% compared to 88% when the NSR05F40NX is used. This is a one percent efficiency increase by simply using a more optimized Schottky diode.
Now let’s look at something that the end user cares about, battery lifetime. We will use a battery with a 7 Wh capacity to determine the battery lifetime. If this application is the only thing that uses power the battery lifetime would be 476 minutes for the NSR0340P2. The NSR05F40NX would provide a battery lifetime of 481.5 minutes. This results in a 5.5 minute increase in the battery lifetime.
Admittedly 5.5 minutes may not be too noticeable from the end users perspective. However, these 5.5 minutes were saved by simply changing one Schottky diode in the LCD backlight system. If this exercise was carried to other devices located in power applications these 1% savings may add up to 30 minutes, an hour or even possibly two hours of extended battery lifetime. Independently 1% savings may not be a big deal, but cumulatively these isolated 1% increases are a big deal.