If the experts are right, conventional Lighting technology will go through an enormous change over the next several years.

Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb has had a long run of market success, but the next new thing is expected to be LEDs — short for light-emitting diodes.

LED lights can illuminate for years longer than conventional bulbs, at a fraction of the energy cost. The technology looks like a winner, but there are some glitches. And Cirrus Logic Inc. is developing fixes.

The Austin company is scaling up production of its LED light controller chips, which it says solve the vexing problem of dimmer switches.

Millions of homes have dimmer switches installed for their lights, and those switches come in hundreds of different types that work by different methods.

But what works for conventional light bulbs doesn't translate easily to LEDs. One big problem with the current generation of LED bulbs is that they don't work well with many kinds of dimmer switches.

An LED plugged into an incompatible dimmer switch can start blinking like a strobe light in a nightclub.

Jason Rhode, Cirrus Logic's CEO, was one of those consumers who bought LED bulbs that didn't work well with his home's dimmer switches.

Rhode says that the dimmer switch challenge is a vital one for the LED industry. If too many customers are frustrated by LED lights, it could slow the market shift toward the new technology.

It also could lead to heavy rates of returned products, which would create headaches both for retailers and bulb manufacturers.

Rhode said his company decided to jump into the LED controller business because its traditional technical strengths — signal processing — fit well with the problem the lighting industry faced.

Signal processing is at the heart of the company's successful line of audio processing chips, some of which are used in Apple Inc.'s smartphones and tablet devices.

Cirrus' idea was to create enough software smarts inside an LED controller to enable the light bulb to work well with the many different kinds of dimmer switches.

It was a straightforward concept but a tough engineering challenge.

There is no global standard for dimmer switches, so the company's engineers had to test hundreds of switches and tweak the chip's software to adjust for the technical differences in different kinds of dimmers. LED bulbs that use Cirrus chips will be able to detect what sort of dimmer switch they are working with and respond appropriately to the dimmer controls.

The company also had to hire some experts in power control circuitry, which has its own set of technical challenges.

Despite the long engineering slog, the company says its new controller chip has a far higher rate of compatibility with dimmer switches than any competing product.

"It is very rare that you have an opportunity to start from scratch and go after a market that doesn't exist," Rhode said. "It is a hard thing to do. It doesn't always go your way. It is a creative process. When you are building something that is really hard, there is a lot of blood, sweat and tears in it. It can be hard to keep plugging away at it. But the team did a wonderful job of staying focused."

Cirrus is working with an unnamed major lighting manufacturer that will use its controller chips in a new generation of LED bulbs. The Austin company expects to ship between 5 million and 10 million LED chips this year.

But that is small potatoes compared with the long-term market potential for LED bulbs, which could climb to several billion a year, according to some projections.

Cirrus also expects to introduce new versions of its LED controller family that will be able to improve the color of light from LED bulbs and to create ways of reducing the component costs for bulb manufacturers.

If Cirrus can carve a significant share of the expanding market, it could help diversify its sales revenue, which is heavily dependent on audio chips for mobile devices.

The prospect of long-term growth in the new market could give investors another reason to like its stock, said analyst Vernon Essi with Needham & Co.

"The investor sentiment around the stock is that it is an Apple-only story," Essi said. "This would change that."