A RGB LED driver with Power Line Capabilities

Solid state lighting through power LED devices is a wide spreading technology in the automotive field, powered by an increasing demand of compact, flexible and efficient light sources. RGB functionality of LED also allows sophisticated and fashioning ambient lighting that is performed with distributed system of lighting sources. LED light colour and intensity programming can be performed with a specific driver capable of command handling. Programmable LED drivers require extra wiring for the communication bus that can be avoided exploiting a power line communication approach. According to such a technique in fact, data are transmitted in a bidirectional way via the existing power cables. An investigation about a power line communication system dedicated to automotive lighting applications is presented in this paper that describes the concept and the methods used for data transmission from a master to some slave nodes. Cost and EMC issues are also discussed.