What’s new in the field of smart headlight technology?

The automotive industry has changed dramatically over the past century, but the purpose of smart headlight systems in cars has remained largely unchanged since their invention. However, with the advent of adaptive driving beam (ADB) technology, this trend has begun to change.

At Texas Instruments (TI), we understand the potential for ADB solutions to disrupt the future of the automotive industry. So we combined our deep expertise in automotive technology with our pioneering work in TI DLP® technology to develop a new generation of intelligent headlight systems that do more than just shine a beam of light in a certain direction.

We believe we can bring additional functionality to the way vehicles illuminate the road ahead. We are currently developing a new fully programmable smart headlamp system solution with extremely high resolution and over 1 million addressable pixels per smart headlamp, which is 10,000 times higher resolution than existing ADB technology.

Using TI DLP technology, developers can create lighting solutions that can be programmed to perform actions such as bullets and animations, or shift beams to adapt to hills and curves on the road. Customers can also develop solutions that partially or fully dim individual pixels, so that drivers can always turn on high beams when operating their vehicles in all conditions without affecting other drivers.

Most importantly, thanks to the flexibility of DLP technology, these smart headlights can use LED or laser light sources for illumination, consuming less power while providing the same coverage area as existing ADB solutions.

"This development is driven by automakers and suppliers looking to technology companies like TI to help differentiate their products. We are proud of TI's existing portfolio of automotive solutions and look forward to sharing more details about the next generation of high-resolution smart headlight systems with the industry soon."

Currently, many customers have begun to sample and design high-resolution smart headlight systems using our DLP technology. The high-resolution DLP5531-Q1 chipset was also launched in 2018.