Meant to post this a few weeks ago (around the 8th of January), but other things got in the way, so I'm doing this post on the Eve of Snowmageddon of the East Coast of the US (I'm in the ground zero area.)

Backstory:

Decided to give an LED bulb (incandescent replacement) a try in my room's light fixture.  To my strange joy (or perhaps not so strange for those of us here), it failed after a few weeks (had the flicker of death.)  Using a combination of a spudger and a screwdriver, I popped off the cover for a closer look.

Into the teardown:

Of course I quickly noticed the burned LED chip.  I checked to see if the LED chip had a dead short with my multimeter, but found no dead short.  I grabbed my cheap lab power supply and fitted it with some cheap multimeter probes and tested all of the LED chips. All for except the burned LED chip lit just fine.  I looked up the driver chip and the model is BP5153HT.  Interestingly enough, each segment (three segments in total) has a different number of LEDs.  I wonder if it has something to do with the bulb being dimmable.

Please pardon the dust inside the tamp. I decided to power it up and interestingly enough, the only segment that lit up (consistently) was the largest segment with the failed LED chip in series.  I guess it just needed a high enough voltage to pass current though it.  

Diagnosis:

I think it's a classic case of things being driven too hard, resulting in too much heat being dissipated, which cooked an LED chip and also likely cooked the driver chip.  I would like to replace the driver chip to verify that's what failed (as opposed to the failed LED chip causing the driver chip to act up), but I can't find a replacement for sale.  If anyone knows s drop-in replacement for sale, please let me know.