DMD Based Automotive Lighting Unit

Today‘s upper class vehicles are often equipped with matrix beam front lighting systems to generate adaptive light distributions. A next step in this development is the use of DMD modules as beam shaping technology. This increases not only the number of individually controlled pixels, but also reduces the system’s complexity by far. The advantage of DMD-based light modules is that they do not require mechanical actuators and thus have no macroscopically moving parts. The light is directed by many micro-mirrors onto the desired areas on the road. The luminous intensity of an automotive light distribution shows high gradients. This required the generation of many dimmed pixels, which are realized by absorbing a large amount of the light so that the system efficiency is lowered significantly. Thus a high luminous flux of the light source is necessary to achieve an automotive light distribution. In this paper we discuss strategies to overcome that disadvantages and to increase the system efficiency of a pixel headlamp. We present a prototype of our concept, consisting of a high-performance DMD projection unit, a specifically developed optical system as well as an adaption algorithm.