Advances in automotive interior lighting concerning new LED approach and optical performance

摘要

Automotive interior lighting has to follow general trends in lighting and will therefore evolve toward hundreds and even thousands of RGB LEDs per car. Creating mood at day and night, pixelated sign-like information, and theater-like effects like welcome and goodbye messages are examples for outstanding user experience. Furthermore, safety features such as warnings and driving state are a must for autonomous cars. It requires new concepts for the whole interior lighting system to reach premium quality such as data rate (beyond today's bus standard for lighting), support for safety rules, compensation of temperature effects, daylight performance (including huge dimming range for night drive), uniformity in terms of luminance and color along the light guide, and mixing of red, green, and blue (RGB) with white. We report a new automotive RGB light-emitting diode (LED) system that fulfills the above requirements and saves effort as well as cost by calibration before integration. Extensive studies were performed for daylight threshold evaluation with subjects and methods for judging on uniformity for direct-lit RGB light guides based on the contrast sensitivity function and Gaussian fit of the LED luminance profile.