## 1 Introduction  
Light-emitting diode (LED) lighting has many advantages, such as high lighting efficiency, a compact size, and fast response. When compared with fluorescent lamps, LEDs are more environmentally friendly because they do not use mercury. As such, with these features, the usage of LED lighting has become an irresistible trend. Among the various advantages of LED, the most prominent still focuses on its high lighting efficiency, although not all questions about the interaction between humans and light emitted by the LEDs have been completely solved [1; 2; 3]. Nowadays, in pursuit of things such as high lighting quality, special lighting atmospheres, and/or energy-saving capacities, many LED lights have incorporated a dimming function. However, because there are many people who do not require higher-quality lighting, LED lighting without the dimming function is still widely used, such as in household or street lighting. For such lights, the key factor of lighting equipment selection depends on the cost-performance ratio of the product [4; 5; 6]. Thus, the development of a simple and low-cost LED driver is likely to greatly enhance the popularity of LED lighting. In the highly-competitive lighting market, the lighting drive circuit, using a self-excited control mechanism, has been widely used in many low-price products--especially in the applications of electronic ballast [7; 8; 9; 10]. The purpose of a self-excited circuit is to drive the power switches repeatedly by using the polarity changes of the voltage across windings of a magnetic component, meaning that it does not need to use an integrated circuit (IC), and the components used to build a direct-current (dc) voltage for the IC can be saved. In the conventional self-excited fluorescent lamp electronic ballast, the circuit topology possesses a half-bridge (inductor-capacitor-capacitor) (LCC) resonant circuit by introducing a saturable transformer connected in series with a resonant circuit to generate the self-excited driving voltage that can drive bipolar junction transistors (BJT) [11; 12; 13]. Regarding driving a BJT, when it is used as a power switch, it requires a base current sufficiently high enough to drive the BJT to operate in the saturation region. However, driving a BJT into the saturation region will influence the charge carrier behavior in the (positive-negative) (PN) junction, thus further affecting the switching time thereof. In general, there are many such uncontrollable factors, including things like saturation point of an iron core, storage time carriers, ambient temperature, and humidity--and all of them hinder the precise control of the resonant frequency and voltage gain of the resonant circuit. On the other hand, active power-factor correctors (PFCs) are widely applied to the lighting circuit due to the increasingly strict regulations on power quality. Although the power factor can be effectively improved by adding a PFC circuit to the original lighting circuit, the number of circuit components then need to be increased, resulting in an uneconomical solution. Thus, aiming to find a cost-effective solution, researchers proposed some single-stage lighting circuits with self-excited control schemes by integrating a PFC and dc-to-dc resonant circuit [14; 15; 16]. However, using BJT as power switches invokes further problems [17], because among these single-stage circuits, two power BJTs could suffer from uneven current and lead to unequal conduction time between the two BJTs, thus making the simplification of single-stage PFC impossible. In this paper, a novel single-stage LED driver with a self-excited mechanism through integration of a boost-type PFC and a half-bridge series resonant converter is proposed. No additional integrated circuit is required. The driving voltages of the self-excited mechanism are taken directly from the center-tapped transformer, which is cascaded by a full-wave diode rectifier to obtain the dc output voltage.