At electronica 2018 Inova Semiconductors, along with the recently announced new alliance members – Magna/OLSA, Melexis, Osram Opto Semiconductors and Microchip Technology, reported on the status of the technology and presented their new solutions to further enhance the ISELED ecosystem.
These concepts and ideas extend far beyond interior lighting ISELED was originally aiming for, now including exterior lighting, an intelligent dome light, a potentially new fieldbus for lighting and sensors, and even a dynamic backlight system for LCD panels.
The next generation of in-car lighting will feature hundreds of LEDs, typically in the form of flexible light strips each comprising many single RGB LEDs, which need to be individually controlled to produce dynamic effects. Each 'digital LED' on the strip consists of a red, green and blue LED chip and the ISELED controller integrated in the same package. The digital LEDs can be daisy-chained. Up to 4,079 of them can be connected via a differential bus at a speed of 2 Mbps. They will be controlled by a single external master controller.
This will effectively make new applications and lighting controls possible for applications where the relatively slow LIN bus is not suitable. With a data rate of 2 Mbit/s light effects at true video speed are possible with the ISELED system. With application software developed by an Alliance member, fascinating lighting effects may be created and simply controlled by an app on a smartphone.
ISELED is on its way from a chip interface to a field bus. The ICN (ISELED Communications Network) will close the gap between LIN and CAN. New target applications include dome lights, intelligent sensors or actuators.
ISELED technology combined with high performance display control will also enable backlight applications. The display content can be sent over the APIX (Automotive Pixel Link) communication link to enable local real-time calculation of dynamic backlighting from the video stream. The control of adjacent (functional) LED strips can be handled over the same communication link. At a result the fusion of display and lighting control can be implemented in one head unit and one communication link.
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