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Hi, Chris Chinnock here for Insight Media at CES 2025. I'm here in the ams Osram booth and we're taking a look at some of their LED devices and applications. The first thing I want to show you is this device right here. This is what they call their iEVIYOS HD25. It is basically 25,000 mini LEDs - I guess they're mini LEDs at this point - maybe micro? They're pretty small. It's a 4 to1 aspect ratio and these are white LEDs you can see the yellow phosphor on top. This is part of the headlight system. You can see that this is coupled into two projectors here, so it's like a high beam and a low beam. This provides all kinds of versatility in the way you manage the light. This is obviously an alternative to a conventional headlight. You can see that there's very wide aspect ratio. It can be moved left and right and you can have two versions of this thing. One has the full 25,000 LEDs and you can manipulate each one of these addressable pixels, so it's basically a display. There's also one which has a smaller addressable count for lower cost options and for automobiles that may be limited by a communication bandwidth. They may not have the bandwidth to do a 25,000 pixel manipulation. This can be used to do logos that could be projected on your garage wall or on a building. It can do symbols and maybe more importantly, it is a safety feature for sure. You can look for pedestrians or something that might be crossing in front of you, so warning symbols of all kinds of different things can be shown. One of the features I also like is the ability to tailor a blind spot. See that black dot in the bottom there? The black shape that's moving around can block oncoming headlights to reduce glare. This can also be used to steer the headlights as you go around corners, for example, or even up and down hills a little bit, so pretty cool applications. They can steer it back and forth there so that's nice. Let's move on to the second one. This is a brand new product that ams Osram is working with this company called kurz. It's called Aliyos and is their functional foil bonding demonstrator. So this company kurz creates these patterns. They can be a metal pattern. They can be a black pattern with a transparent middle. They can be this is a kind of a matte metallic pattern here. This is another pattern here with a black cover on top of it. One of the things they highlighted in particular is this one here. Whoa that's a little bright. Some companies want to have a transparent window here, so these mini LEDs are mounted on a transparent flexible foil which kind of sounds like polyimide, but they didn't confirm that, however. It is then optically bonded, so this becomes another design feature for folks in the automotive environment. Moving down, this is a proof of concept demonstrator here. Yeah, it's not going to look too good in the video here for sure. It doesn't look that great here either. But this is based on laser sources - three RGB lasers with a separate mems scanner. This little box up here shows the different sizes. You could have an LED as in this first package on the left and then with TO cans down below to shrink the size. And then you do these little lasers here, these surface mount lasers, that are then combined through, I presume, some dichroic prisms into a single beam which goes to a mem scanner, which is not shown. The point of this demo is that this is real wood and trying to get an LED image through real wood is hard. First of all, you need a lot of luminance. Second of all, with LEDs because of their spectral spread, it becomes a very soft image and very little contrast. Lasers, with their very narrow spectrum, can create a much sharper image. There is tons of speckle on this that they realize they would have to fix that going forward. But these are actually automotive grade surface mount lasers which don't require a lot of thermal stability either. So that's a kind of interesting option. And finally, over here they're showing a thing that they call RGBi, so RGB LEDs mated on an IC driver chip. So the IC itself is 3.7x 3.1 mm and it has one red, one green, and one blue LED on it. The idea of doing this is if you have multiple LEDs you can now daisy chain all of these devices together which will simplify how you put together the particular lighting option that you want to consider. So for example, if you want to do this with a design like this, they told me you if wanted to do that on a conventional PCB it becomes a four layer PCB. If you can daisy chain it you only have to do a single layer PCB because it really simplifies the connection for driving it. So there's a system trade-off - you pay a little bit more for the RGB plus the IC, but you save on some of the integration issues. It is also factory calibrated. Each device is factory calibrated for a certain white point and luminance so if you have to replace them, you won't have a mismatch in the display. And it makes it much easier to integrate these things at the tier one or whoever the customer is because you don't have to do that calibration. It's Plug and Play basically. With this IC they have a special name for this IC - Stand Alone Integrated Driver (SAIC). The same IC that's used for the LEDs can also drive a certain number of sensors. So you can start to think about integrating various sensors in the design with your LEDs. The whole rationale for putting this together and developing this solution is to offer more of a free form design tool. You're not stuck with the traditional layouts. You can do all kinds of different things now and daisy chaining together in a way that really wasn’t possible before or at least was possible but a little bit more difficult. So that is pretty much all I know right now. Chris Chinnock for Insight Media.
