Evaluation kit simplifies automotive LED light design

14th March 2018

Enaie Azambuja

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The ISELED Alliance has launched a new evaluation kit for ISELED, a digital smart RGB LED solution for automotive ambient lighting. The evaluation kit allows developers to quickly build and prototype ISELED solutions, thereby significantly reducing development time. Custom lighting effects can be easily programmed using the supplied software suite from Lucie Labs and tested on the kit’s 16 RGB LEDs. Optical measurements can be carried out to evaluate various lighting solutions.

ISELED is a concept for in-car LED lighting that substantially reduces system cost and complexity, simplifies control and enables the creation of dynamically changing light effects.

This and various other LED-related products and solutions for the automotive market are currently being jointly developed under the open ISELED Alliance umbrella. The ISELED Alliance members are Inova Semiconductors, Dominant Opto, Lucie Labs, NXP Semiconductors, TE Connectivity, the University of Pforzheim and Valeo.

The evaluation kit is based on NXP’s S32K144EVB-Q100 controller board featuring the automotive qualified S32K1xx Arm® Cortex® based MCU with a USB cable for connection to a PC host.

An adapter board including a power supply, is plugged into a bar of 16 RGB LEDs from Dominant Opto. Each LED includes an INLC100 controller die from Inova Semiconductors housed in a single three-LED package (red, green and blue).

The ISELED software driver from NXP and the LED lighting effects studio tool from Lucie Labs are pre-programmed in the S32K MCU and available free of charge under a 3-month evaluation license.

Roland Neumann, CTO at Inova Semiconductors said, "To control LEDs individually, previous solutions required a microcontroller for each pixel comprising of three LEDs, which was inherently too expensive to be a viable solution".

"The ISELED concept has now resolved this issue by utilising a compact, smart LED driver and a proprietary, high-speed communications protocol developed by Inova Semiconductors to enable highly responsive, dynamic lighting effects and most importantly, it delivers substantial cost savings.”

Yan Lee-Dajoux, CEO at Lucie Labs noted that, "In providing a complete software stack and electronics package, this demo kit highlights the power of this next-generation ISELED lighting solution".

"It not only presents a paradigm shift in terms of electronic innovation, it also points out the crucial importance of processes in new product development. With the Lucie Labs Software Suite, it now takes just 5 minutes to create a lighting effect utilising high-density LED topology.”

Manuel Alves, General Manager for Automotive General Purpose Microcontrollers at NXP said, "The release of this kit is a key milestone in accelerating the adoption of the ISELED protocol. It features all the necessary hardware, software and tool components to demonstrate and evaluate the complete solution, based on NXP’s production-ready S32K Software Development Kit and ISELED driver.”