LED lighting has taken over the automotive electronics segment at a lightning pace, however, this new revolution comes with its own fruits and drawbacks. In this write-up, we will be discussing about a few major challenges being faced by this domain at the moment.
The trend of LED lighting has proliferated in the automotive electronics world at a lightening speed. The list of reasons for this change resonated with the list of benefits that includes small size, lower power consumption and longevity. These attributes make it a perfect alternative considering the challenges that are being faced by the ecology today.
Fig. 1: Internal Rendering of an MPM6010 Automotive LED Driver Module
LED lights are present both on outer and inner end of automotive. But for further adoption, these face litany of technical issues. The major ones are related to implementation of more exotic and smaller LED solution. Most relevant issues are related to reliability, thermal management, resistance against EMI (Electromagnetic Interference).
● Better reliability has been a constant challenge in automotive engineering, it holds utmost importance with respect to exterior lighting. The thumb rule dictates that lesser the number of components with maximum reliability lesser will be the chances of failing out, handling material, layout complication, and debugging of designs and bringing them faster to the market.
● The narrowing down of LED systems need shrinking of other associated electronics as well. Usual trick is to go for much smaller board design which implies increasing operational frequency of switching drivers. This brings down the dimensions of capacitors and associated inductors. But higher switching frequencies means catastrophic increment in radiated emissions. If you increase the switching frequency by double, it increases the EMI by four times. This challenge can be addressed by rigorous tuning of schematics and layouts for minimizing sensitive pathways and selecting low-loss components. It means a lot of work that extends from switches to decoupling capacitors, energy shuttling inductors, and so forth.
● LEDs consume far less power as compared to incandescent and halogen counterparts. The designers also need to be careful about thermal management that has a direct connection with LED life expectancy. LEDs are known for subjecting the designers to thousands of operational hours that can be reduced by bringing LEDs under excessive high junction temperatures and harsh climates. However, the vehicles might not be able to survive such conditions.
MPS kept all these challenges in mind while developing the new MPM6010-AEC1. It is one of the most highly developed automotive LED driver modules in industry. A 1.5A, 36V LED module, it can integrate automotive-grade inductor and decoupling capacitors with synchronous step-down LED drivers. It is quite useful for 15W exterior and interior lighting applications. It simplifies the board layout to quite an extent and opens up the possibility for full LED driver solution.
Fig. 2: Image Showing A Typical MPM6010 Application Circuit for 1.5A
The MPM6010-AEC1 makes use of the amazing RDS (ON) process technology that was made famous with DC/DC converter solutions yielding 2.2MHz and bringing our cooler-running LED systems.
