Philips Lumileds has made an improvement on SnapLED, the automotive industry’s most widely used LED for signaling application.

Engineers from Philips Lumileds have raised junction temperature to 135°C, highest in the industry for a mid-power LED, and narrowed color binning to levels imperceptible by the human eye, dual-binned for drive current to simplify the design process and make it easier to meet critical regulation requirements, and implemented a new Multi-Environment Over Stress Test (MEOST) regimen to ensure SnapLED is the most reliable automotive LED.

According to Scott Kern, Strategic and Product Marketing at Philips Lumileds，“A ‘build out of the box’ approach to turn, tail, and stop lighting applications on vehicles is a major step forward for the auto industry and significantly reduces engineering and development costs．”

Flux bin sizes, which were already quite small, have been reduced by as much as 67% so that flux variations within a bin are imperceptible to the human eye.

The forward voltage bin widths have been reduced by as much as 50%, making the use of low-cost, resistor-based driver circuits easier to implement. And SnapLED is designed to operate over a dynamic current range of 30:1, allowing for simplified, yet reliable, designs for both stop- and tail-mode operation.