A Flexible LED Driver for Automotive Lighting Applications: IC Design and Experimental Characterization

This letter presents a smart driver for LEDs, particularly for automotive lighting applications, which avoid ringing and overshoot phenomena. To this aim, advanced Soft Start and Current Slope Control techniques are integrated on-chip. This letter discusses the driver design integrating in high voltage CMOS technology, the digital circuitry for programming and electronic control units interfacing, and the power devices up to 10 W. Experimental characterizations with LEDs of different power levels and with different types of connections are showed. The smart driver sustains automotive temperature and voltage requirements; moreover it has high power efficiency, it is programmable, and can be configured to work as a linear regulator (for low current LEDs) or in switch mode (for higher power LEDs).