Smart cockpit functions with increasingly rich functions benefit from stronger user perception and are becoming the main entry point for competitive differentiation for automobile companies. EO Think Tank predicts that the market penetration rate of front-mounted smart cockpits for Chinese passenger cars will rapidly rise to 35% in 2025, and the market size will also increase significantly to 106 billion yuan. By integrating lighting, sensing and other electronic components, smart surfaces are both decorative and functional. They have become the core carrier of human-vehicle interaction in smart cockpits. They are also one of the most popular smart cockpit applications and are the key to increasing the value of future cars. One of the key points.

Recently, at the 11th EEVIA Annual China Hard Technology Media Forum and Industry Chain Research and Innovation Trend Outlook Seminar, Bai Yangong, Director of Automotive Application Technology of ams-OSRAM Greater China and Asia-Pacific Region, started from the application and challenges of smart surfaces and went into depth. Share how innovative optical and sensing technologies are reshaping the way humans and vehicles interact, further bringing new growth and promotion to emerging applications inside and outside the car.

1. Smart Surfaces: A New Paradigm for Future Automotive Interaction

As an innovative technology, the most intuitive understanding of smart surface is to replace mechanical buttons with hidden electronic buttons. It has three outstanding advantages: First, the cost of traditional physical buttons is relatively high, while smart surfaces can realize a variety of buttons and have Flexible customization function, you can also update button settings through OTA upgrade. Secondly, with the trend of simplicity in automobile interior design, hidden electronic buttons can meet consumers' requirements for a unified interior design style. Finally, smart surfaces also contribute to the lightweight design of cars. Especially for electric vehicles, lightweight means longer range, thus reducing range anxiety.

Automotive architecture is evolving from traditional distributed architecture to centralized and central architecture, and the local concentration of intelligent surface applications is also increasing. As a typical in-car smart surface application, the central control integrates various control functions. For example, the central control uses pixelated LEDs to display different colors or perform pixelated control according to different operations and different application conditions, providing richer visual human-computer interaction information. At the same time, the central control also integrates touch and pressure sensing detection devices, realizing various control functions such as various buttons, sliders, and knobs, which greatly improves the convenience and effectiveness of user operations. In addition, the central control also has the function of intelligently adjusting the backlight brightness according to the ambient light brightness. This avoids glare or dimness when lit, providing a more comfortable and natural visual experience.

ams OSRAM Automotive Interiors-Central Control Optics and Sensing Applications

Bai Yangong pointed out that the realization of smart surface applications is not easy. Under the trend of centralized design, various functions of future automobiles will be concentrated in different domains. Smart surface applications must integrate sensors, control functions, software and algorithms, etc., and ensure coordination and smooth cooperation between them, which is a challenge. Heavy. Take the brightness adjustment function as an example. People have become accustomed to almost instantaneous response to brightness adjustment on smartphones because it is equipped with a local light sensor. Cars are usually equipped with only one central brightness sensor, which needs to request brightness values from different locations to the central domain before making adjustments. Therefore, there will be some delay and instantaneous response cannot be achieved.

How to solve the challenges in implementing these smart surface applications? Bai Yangong took ams-Osram's new smart RGB LED product OSIRE® E3731i and the self-developed and open-source communication protocol OSP as examples. Through the application of ambient lighting, she demonstrated the use of innovative optical and sensing technologies by ams-Osram. The unique idea of making smart surfaces more intelligent, efficient and reliable.

2. Smart LED: The road to innovation in dynamic lighting

In the application of smart surfaces in cars, ambient lighting can be regarded as a sudden rise. In addition to traditional roof interior lights, center consoles, and foot pedals, it is also used in many places such as car logos, door handles, and welcome lights. Thanks to the rapid development of upstream optical technology, ambient lights can not only adjust brightness and color, but also become a medium for human-machine emotional interaction through unique breathing effects and musical rhythm effects. This innovation not only improves users' driving comfort, but also strengthens their identification with the car brand, and has been enthusiastically sought after by car companies.

The current application trends of ambient lighting can be summarized as the following five points:

First, the number of LEDs continues to increase and is expected to rapidly grow to as high as 1,000 in a few years. Therefore, it is necessary to consider how to build a systematic solution to flexibly adjust such a large number of LED lights.

Secondly, customers have increasingly higher requirements for the brightness of lamps. The use environment of ambient lights extends from night to strong light environment during the day. Therefore, different light environments need to be considered during design to maintain the best lighting effect at all times.

Thirdly, in order to achieve smart surfaces through one-time injection molding of IME, LEDs must be able to withstand high temperature and high pressure environments.

Fourth, for the greatly increased number of LED lights, display consistency is also an important issue. LED lights throughout the vehicle should display the same color and brightness to ensure visual consistency. Therefore, there are also higher requirements for the consistency of the LED itself and the calibration of color point and brightness.

Finally, there are many issues related to LED properties. Different car companies and consumers have different requirements for the color point of LEDs. The color point and brightness change under different current drives, temperatures and usage times. Therefore, compensation information such as color point and brightness needs to be preset for full life cycle calibration. . The color mixing of RGB lights also requires sufficient flexibility and programmability to ensure that the final color mixing effect meets expectations.

ams OSRAM Automotive Interiors-Ambient Lighting Application Trends

In response to the above trend needs, ams-OSRAM launches new smart RGB LED product OSIRE® E3731i. This smart LED has a built-in driver and a serial bus interface that supports OSP, which simplifies the situation where a lighting system composed of a large number of LEDs in the past required multiple MCUs and drivers to be controlled. Up to 1,000 LEDs can be connected in series through a daisy chain with only one OSP bus. Nodes (i.e. 1,000 LEDs) and only need one MCU control, which greatly improves the system integration and design and development efficiency.

The outstanding performance of OSIRE® E3731i does not stop there. It also has a built-in temperature sensor and on-chip memory, and the required color point, brightness, compensation information under various conditions, etc. are preset at the factory. Customers only need to read the corresponding parameters when using it, and they can easily achieve full life cycle terminal calibration, ensuring that each LED in the system presents a high degree of optical consistency and uniformity, which also greatly simplifies the previous tedious use and calibration process.

Bai Yangong said that based on ams and OSRAM's OSIRE® E3731i, the application of interior ambient lighting in cars will be more convenient and efficient, meeting consumers' demands for an ever-improving driving experience, and also setting a new benchmark for technological innovation in the field of automotive dynamic lighting. model.

3. OSP Ecology: More than just the smart surface in front of you

In smart surface applications, in addition to lighting, the integration of sensors is also a challenge. Drawing on the implementation experience of the OSP bus, ams-OSRAM has developed an OSP converter on the existing basis. Considering that most sensors in the car use the I2C interface, this OSP converter can be used to directly convert the I2C protocol data into OSP protocol, thus enabling flexible integration of sensor requirements into smart surface systems.

This integration method shows significant advantages in practical applications. Bai Yangong further introduced the design of a lamp panel containing 300 lamp beads as an example. OEM requires the brightness of the lamp panel to be adjusted according to the ambient light brightness. The traditional method is to set an MCU on the outside of the lamp panel, or request brightness information through a central domain control, or Connect the light sensor to the MCU. With the help of ams-OSRAM's open source OSP bus and OSP converter, design engineers can easily replace any lamp node on the OSP bus with an OSP converter, and connect the sensor to the system through the OSP converter. This allows system design to be more flexible to meet the diverse OEM design needs.

ams and osram open source OSP ecosystem

It can be said that based on the OSP bus, system integration will become more efficient and simpler. Through unified interfaces and protocols, different devices and functions are perfectly integrated into one system, greatly simplifying the system design and development process. At the same time, it improves the scalability of the system, making the addition and removal of equipment flexible. In addition, the open source OSP bus improves system performance and enables high-speed communication and collaborative work between devices.

With innovative optical and sensing technologies as its core, ams-OSRAM has launched smart RGB LEDs, OSP buses and OSP converters, bringing more convenient and flexible integration solutions to smart surface applications. This innovation not only demonstrates ams-OSRAM's leading position in the lighting and sensing fields, but will also innovate the value enhancement points of future automobiles through the development of OSP concepts and ecology. Bai Yangong concluded that the combination of lighting and sensing will bring a more intelligent and humanized interactive experience to cars, enhance the sense of technology, comfort and safety of cars, and inject new vitality into the future car market.

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