Low Cost, Intelligent LED Driver Design with only one single flexible microcontroller

NEC Electronics Europe today announced the release of its 78K0/Ix2 LED microcontroller (MCU) demonstration kit based on NEC Electronics’ 78K0/Ix2 lighting ASSP.

The kit demonstrates how an efficient and intelligent LED driver design can be implemented without any additional driver ICs but only by a single flexible microcontroller capable of maintaining programmable constant current through multiple LED channels only using the integrated unique peripheral architecture allowing no CPU involvement which at the mean time can process DALI or DMX512 communications."

Three channels of RGB LEDs are populated on the board together with the relative 3 slide switches for analog dimming demonstration. In addition, the connectors for DALI and DMX512 interfaces are mounted on the PCB to demonstrate lighting standard communications and in particular the integrated Manchester code generator in the architecture of the 78K0/Ix2 MCU for DALI protocol implementation.

The Applilet EZ software enables graphical configurations for the board, automatically generates pre-compiled code and programs the target device using a USB cable. This tool also generates code for DALI and DMX512 communications which can then be tested by connecting the 78K0Ix2-LED board to the recently released 78K0 Lighting Communications kit or other DALI or DMX512 network compatible devices.

The light output of the 3 RGB LED channels can be controlled remotely through a PC or other host by connecting the 78K0Ix2-LED board to a DALI or DMX512 master controller. Color mixing, flashing sequences and dimming can then be implemented and tested using the above configuration.

The 78K0/Ix2 LED Demonstration kit, order code 78K0Ix2-LED, is available now.