ISELED Alliance expands to drive the ‘digital LED’

The newest member of the open ISELED Alliance that was formed to develop and market the innovative in-vehicle LED lighting concept, the ‘digital LED’, is Melexis. Melexis joins a number of existing members including Inova Semiconductors, Dominant Opto Technologies, Lucie Labs, OLSA Group, NXP, TE Connectivity, Pforzheim University and Valeo.

The ISELED Alliance is committed to creating an ecosystem, which delivers a complete solution based upon the ISELED concept including both hardware and software. The core product is a ‘Digital’ RGB LED that is integrated into a tiny package. In addition to the simplification of LED control, the innovative approach enables new extensions of the functionality of LED lighting in automobiles.

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 single red, green and blue LED with 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 2Mbps.

They will be controlled by a single external master controller such as the S32K microcontroller series of NXP. 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 2Mbit light effects at true video speed are possible with the ISELED system. With the application software developed by Alliance member LucieLabs, fascinating lighting effects may be created and simply controlled by an app on a smartphone.

“Melexis is proud to join the ISELED alliance and to actively contribute to one of the most innovative fields within the automotive industry – lighting,” commented Michael Bender, Product Line Manager Lighting Products at Melexis. “As a global automotive semiconductor supplier we are always focused on innovation and technology evolutions. Today, we provide multiple ICs and IC-sets to enable cost efficient and innovative lighting implementations within the automotive industry thereby enabling a bright future. We want to use this knowledge to further develop ISELED into an accepted industry standard as well as to enable additional application fields”.

Robert Kraus, CEO at Inova Semiconductors and a founding partner of the Alliance, added: “The Melexis entry into the Alliance further underlines the acceptance of ISELED as a highly innovative technology, including the associated ecosystem. We will announce additional new members, major players like Melexis, to the Alliance very soon, further strengthening this unique technology concept and enabling new and exciting LED lighting features in the next generation of cars.“