Automotive lighting facing the design trend: From former basic conception to reliable and sustainable advanced development

When introducing LEDs in automotive lighting, the first achieved benefit was the reduction of the power consumption combined with an extended lifetime. Nevertheless, with the maturity level the technology tends to reach and the growing importance of the lighting design in the automotive market, electronic designers must deal with more important constraints, that in turns lead to higher driving current, then less expected lifetime. These restrictions could deal with mechanical interfaces - that are related either with the housing shape or with the mechanical constraints associated to the assembly module. Optical systems with glass inclination have also a great influence on the required flux, thus leading to more thermal constraints. Global tendency is also to go to more complex circuitries or integrated SoC ones. Therefore, resistive and linear drivers are more and more replaced with high-efficiency DC-DC converters managed by microcontrollers. Due to these constraints among others, doing a reliable and sustainable design becomes more complex. Hardware designers must keep in mind universal models for reliability prediction of electronics components, PCBs and equipment, so that the module may last more than the expected vehicle lifetime.