New opportunities for domestic LED control chips as car matrix headlights become more popular

Car headlights have undergone a long evolution. Since the maturity of LED light sources, smaller size and higher luminous efficiency have made car headlights more possible. Today, with the maturity of LED headlights, matrix headlights have been popularized from optional high-end models to models priced at more than 100,000 yuan.

With the popularity of LED matrix headlights, the corresponding demand for control chips is also growing, and the value of controllers is increasing. Under cost optimization, controller splitting may become a future trend, which will bring new growth space for related companies.

Under

this trend, the automotive headlight LED matrix control chip has more market opportunities. Recently, Jihai Semiconductor launched a GALT61120 automotive headlight LED matrix control chip designed for intelligent headlight lighting systems. It is said that this product can enhance the interoperability and driving safety of headlight systems. Compared with international competitors, the static power consumption and dynamic power consumption of GALT61120 are reduced by more than 20%. It is suitable for automotive headlight systems, high-brightness LED matrix systems, AD B adaptive headlight systems, animated daytime running lights, intelligent interactive matrix headlights, smart projection headlights, etc.

GALT61120 is an analog enhanced ASIC chip with built-in 12 channels, 4 groups, and 3 series high-voltage switches. The maximum current of each switch is 1.5A, and the single-channel low on-resistance is 120mΩ. It can independently drive 12 LEDs or LED strings, and can also program and control 4 substrings to achieve substring combination mode. It also supports programmable 10-bit PWM dimming. Each MOS supports independent PWM adjustment. The synchronization of PWM has two modes: hardware pin control and command control, which can achieve high-precision control of 1024 levels of brightness.

For matrix car light applications, especially some high-pixel matrix car lights, higher communication rates are required to meet data transmission. GALT61120 has a built-in multi-point UART communication interface , which is compatible with the CAN physical layer. The maximum communication rate is 1Mbps. Up to 32 chips can be cascaded to achieve high and low beam matrix light groups and animated headlight scene effects.

In terms of safety, as a product for automotive headlight applications, GALT61120 has passed the AEC-Q100 Grade 1 automotive certification , with an operating temperature range of -40℃~125℃; it also has functions such as LED open/short circuit detection and protection, real-time monitoring of faults while ensuring the normal operation of the lamp group; integrated CRC calculation unit, with software fault detection and processing capabilities; built-in communication watchdog timer , which can monitor whether the communication process has timed out and determine the working status of the chip. In addition to Jihai,

Indixinwei Aladdin iND83080 has some domestic manufacturers that have launched related products in the field of automotive headlight matrix control chips. Last year, Indixinwei released an automotive headlight matrix control chip Aladdin iND83080, which can be used for automotive matrix control, external dynamic turn signals/position lights, etc., and supports adaptive high beam lighting (ADB), dynamic position lights (PL), daytime running lights (DRL) and other lighting systems. The bus supports up to 32 chips, and through software synchronization, unified control of large-scale lighting systems can be achieved.

iND83080 integrates 12-channel MOS switches and supports four groups of parallel or series connection. Each switch can be independently controlled by 12-bit PWM internal signal to achieve fine brightness adjustment.

Unlike GALT61120, iND83080 supports ELINS protocol, which can be regarded as a private protocol through UART interface . It is said to be based on UART hardware. Without increasing too much system cost, it can reach a communication speed of up to 2Mbps. While increasing the LED refresh speed, the private protocol also improves the robustness of communication.

Summary:

As the number of LED lamp beads in matrix headlights increases, the car headlight matrix control chip also needs continuous performance upgrades, including improving communication speed, integrating more channels of MOS switches, and providing more precise brightness control. At the same time, the increase in the number of lamp beads in the headlights also brings a higher failure rate. The control chip needs to have more measures to deal with LED lamp bead failures.