Moore’s law on matters digital describes an ever-increasing rate of improvement when digital technology is adopted, and automotive parts giant Continental is fulfilling the law with a dramatic advance in headlights.
Smart headlights are only just starting to appear on some luxury models, but Continental has already come up with a system that is not only far more refined but also cheap enough that it may well end up on mainstream models.
The improved headlight system is the first product to come out of a 2018 joint venture formed between Continental, the world’s largest car parts supplier, and the OSRAM company, famous for its domestic and industrial lighting.
While Continental is best known for its century of tyre development and production, several large acquisitions of automotive tech companies including Siemens-VDO mean that engine, drivetrain and safety tech now represents 70 per cent of the Continental business.
The two companies brought together their optical and digital skills to create a high definition headlight system that offers greater flexibility in tuning its output for the changing road conditions.
The key to the system is the development of the EVYIOS LED, which is integrated onto a single printed circuit board along with the necessary control electronics.
“The systems that are already on the road, they have maybe 30 pixels or 124 pixels,” OSRAM Continental (OC) engineer Martin Petzold said.
“Here we have more than 8000 pixels.”
Each pixel is individually controllable according to the information coming from an infrared camera mounted high on the windscreen, behind the rear-vision mirror and the steering wheel.
The LEDs are backed up by lasers incorporated into the headlight unit.
If the camera detects a deer on the side of the road, the system will turn on the relevant pixels to ensure the driver has the earliest possible warning.
The system has all the regular features of smart headlamp systems, like dousing the high beam so as not to inconvenience on-coming drivers and drivers of cars directly in front, he said. When turning left, the pixels illuminating the right side of the road will dim.
Mr Petzold said existing systems had three rows of LEDs, with the bottom row for low-beam application and the top two rows for adaptive driving beam.
“Here we have 32 rows. That means is the resolution is much higher. So you can cut out a car really sharp if it is in front of you, or coming at you. This is an increase of comfort maybe for you.”
While the new system is more expensive than regular headlights, Petzold said that does not mean the system will only be found on expensive cars.
“I think it’s complicated because we are taking about getting such systems in mid-class cars. So not only in the high class, we are talking about projects which will be coming in the middle class.”
And Petzold is confident OC can continue to chase development under Moore’s law.
“This is now the first generation what we are showing here. We have one chip with 1000 pixels and the second generation of these chips, we are talking about 25,000 pixels on a chip.”
The new Smartrix-HD system was unveiled at Continental’s bi-annual TechWeek, which traditionally co-incides with the Frankfurt motor show.