Read more from the Power Management Series: Driving LED Designs
Automobile LED headlight clusters combine high and low beams, daytime running lights, and sometimes signal and clearance lights into a single headlight cluster. The components of the cluster can have vastly different driver requirements, including voltage and current requirements, topologies, power levels, or unique dimming functions.
Meeting the range of requirements usually means employing separate driver solutions. Using multiple drivers not only complicates bills of materials (BOMs) and production, it can also make it difficult to meet electromagnetic-interference (EMI) standards. Each additional driver adds its high-frequency signals to the EMI mix, complicating EMI qualification, troubleshooting, and mitigation.