MENTOR develops new coloured light solution for automotive and other applications.

One field of application for sophisticated RGB solutions is the interior illumination of passenger cars. Colour change systems for the vehicle interior are getting more and more popular and are no longer reserved just for the premium models. They have found their way into trendy vehicles and are increasingly incorporated into high sales-volume models. In contrast to the past where functional aspects such as good orientation were attentional imortant, today it is more about emotional aspects such as ambience, feeling comfortable and perceived value or also the desire to have individual lighting that is adjusted to the preferences of the individual driver and can be set according to their mood.

Other fields of application where sophisticated dynamic coloured light solutions are increasingly employed include planes, boats and trains as well the merchandise presentation and interior design sectors. What is always demanded is lighting that delivers a homogeneous colour picture and perfect synchronisation of all the RGB light sources used and with a colour palette covers the entire range of the RGB colour spectrum. For demanding requirements like these MENTOR has developed a new solution and presented it at Electronica 2014 in Munich. This solution is based on an intelligent RGB basic module with integrated microcontroller that due to its compact installation space can be used for many different applications as flat, linear and spot light both for direct and indirect light.

This newly developed integrated microcontroller and a hundred per cent end-of-line calibration of the modules make it possible to compensate for the effects of temperature and ageing as well as for colour and brightness binning caused by production. At the same time the luminous flux of each module is adjusted individually to either avoid or deliberately use light density differences between individual applications. In this way a constant chromaticity coordinate and a constant brightness of all RGB lights integrated in the system are guaranteed. The new MENTOR solution is able to communicate according to automotive standard LIN and the LEDs and microcontrollers used are automotive-certified.