Intersil Presents Laser Diode Driver for Automotive HUDs

Intersil Corp., a renowned provider of advanced power management and precision analog solutions, has recently unveiled the ISL78365 laser diode driver for automotive heads-up display (HUD) systems. Setting this highly integrated device apart in the industry are its high intensity lasers up to 750mA for projecting full-HD color video onto the windshield at around twice the current of competitive solutions. Thanks to the ISL78365’s higher current and faster switching speed, it enables HUDs with high-color depth, high resolution, and high frame-rate projections.

Laser HUDs are by far the newest innovation in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). A car’s HUD keeps motorists fully focused on the road while safely providing speed, warning signals and other important vehicle and navigation information on the windshield directly in the driver’s line of sight. The latest generation of augmented reality laser HUDs provide near-zero latency and a wide field of view. What’s more, they overlay extra real-time information such as traffic signs and a planned turning lane, virtually painting arrows and lines on the road ahead to make navigation directions noticeable and easy to follow.

A complete solution for driving lasers in the scanned-MEMS laser projection systems, the ISL78365 is now being deployed in next-gen vehicles. It is the only laser driver in the industry with a fourth channel for supporting wide-ranging laser diode configurations, enabling system designers to attain the desired brightness and sharp, rich colors with high contrast.

Moreover, the ISL78365 offers sub-1.5ns rise and fall times for quicker switching speed than competitive devices, leading to high frame rate, HD color video. It also offers 10-bit color and 10-bit scale resolution to support an array contrast levels for each driver channel. Plus, ISL78365’s flexible synchronous parallel video interface supports pixel rates up to 150MHz or 1900 pixels per line.

Featuring dynamic power management, ISL78365 enhances the laser-diode power supply and offers three power saving modes for enhanced efficiency and reduced power dissipation to meet system thermal requirements. There is also a programmable multi-pulse return to zero (RTZ) feature that decreases speckling, while the device’s wettable flank QFN package streamlines integration into compact laser projection HUDs.

Philip Chesley, senior vice president of Precision Products at Intersil, said that the ISL78365 offers automakers the high drive capability, color video accuracy, and switching speed that enables state-of-the-art laser HUDs for today’s luxury vehicles and tomorrow’s car models. He concluded that their feature-rich laser diode driver reduces system size and intricacy while delivering considerably higher performance than the competition.