Novel Automotive High Intensity Discharge(HID) Lamps with Electronic Ballasts

A new scheme of automotive high intensity discharge(HID) lamps with electronic ballasts is proposed. The design of the proposed ballast and some experimental results are presented. The proposed scheme is consisted of the high frequency DC-DC converter and the low frequency DC-AC inverter. This system separates the input voltage of the ignitor from DC link voltage using auxiliary winding, then it could use the lower voltage rating power devices for HID lamp ballast system and reduce the size of HID lamp ballast. The proposed ballast controller using micro-controller unit(MCU) controls the frequency to operate the DC-DC converter in critical conduction mode, which reduces the noise of the circuit and improves the efficiency by 2%~4%.