ISELED alliance announces new digital LED technology for automotive LED lights

The mission of the ISELED Alliance is to create vehicle LED lights and solutions for the automotive LED light market. These solutions are to be based on an entirely new car LED lights concept that reduces costs, simplifies control, and improves the functionality of car LED lights and display solutions.

The founding partners of the open ISELED Alliance are Inova, Dominant Opto Technologies, NXP, TE Connectivity  and Pforzheim University.

As the market moves towards autonomously driven vehicles quickly, in-car LED lights will become more and more important and challenging. 

This upcoming type of in-car LED light will typically consist of 10 to 30 LED chips mounted on a flexible strip. Each group of one red, green, and blue LED will form a "pixel", which at 24-bit resolution (3x8-bit) can be set to more than 16 million colors.

At the present time, in order to individually control LEDs, a microcontroller containing LED-specific data is needed for each individual RGB LED. For this reason, such a solution is typically too troublesome and expensive to be workable. Also, it is not possible to capture individual LED life parameters such as functionality and temperature.

Now, the Inova semiconductors in-car LED light concept is set to change the automotive LED paradigm by creating an amazingly compact smart LED driver ic that is directly integrated with three color LEDs into a tiny 3mm x 4mm package. The processing power is provided by a microcontroller from NXP, perfectly suited for the project.

Based on the experience it gained during the development of its APIX communications standard, Inova has built a high-speed communications protocol that allows every LED to be individually used. By supporting data rates up to an impressive 2 Mbit/s, the new protocol enables very fast, dynamic lighting effects. Thus, the easy scalability of the solution will enable remarkable cost savings and provide new market opportunities.

The smart LED driver from Inova provides complex calibration features, ensuring every LED will render the same color and brightness over the full temperature range, thereby ensuring automotive LED lighting consistency, even accepting greater LED manufacturing tolerances. A single microcontroller can now manage an LED strip containing 4,096 LEDs.

The extremely low thermal resistance of the housing, which is 30% lower than in other simliary products, reduces the power consumption of the LED by achieving better light efficiency with cooler LEDs.

A built-in temperature sensor ensures accuracy, while the calculation values of the CCM LED drivers and temperature compensation parameters are securely stored in non-volatile memory, an indispensable requirement for safety-related applications.