Intersil Corporation has introduced the industry’s first automotive grade ambient light sensor designed to support continuous operation up to 105 degrees Celsius. The ISL76683 is qualified to the Automotive Electronics Council’s AEC-Q100 grade 2, assuring reliability under significant thermal stress. It also maintains package transparency under automotive thermal stress, solving a known issue with existing sensors.
The new ISL76683’s unique package provides an optimal solution for measuring light levels in a wide variety of automotive applications, including flat panel display backlighting, courtesy lighting control and temperature-sensitive windshield applications. The integrated 16-bit analog-to-digital converter core provides on-chip sensor signal conditioning along with user programmable sensitivity to tailor performance for specific lighting conditions.
Providing further design flexibility, the ISL76683 features built-in rejection of infrared and ultraviolet light, providing a close to human eye ideal sensitivity (lambda response), as well as 50Hz and 60Hz flicker elimination technology. The sensor is temperature-compensated, removing the requirement to compensate for the vehicle’s thermal environment. In addition, light level thresholds are programmable via I2C, enabling designers to set up an automatic monitoring system while simultaneously reducing system level control overhead.