Engineers from Lumileds and Melexis have demonstrated the operation of Luxeon IR LEDs at up to 40MHz, enabling Time-of-Flight applications in 940nm and 850nm with a range of up to 3 meters. According to Lumileds, the inherent properties of the Luxeon IR LEDs produce the clean and repeatable response curve required for TOF operations.
Erno Fancsali, Director CPAT EMEA at Lumileds stated, “The illuminator evaluation kit developed by Lumileds reduces the rise and fall times of the light pulses to 6 ns, which is a factor of 4 over other similar LED devices.”
Fancsali indicated that this reduction comes from optimizing the combination of the improved peak current response of the Luxeon IR LEDS, the PCB design, and the boost electronics. Fancsali further said that the illuminator card enables an LED-based TOF system with the range and accuracy comparable to VCSEL-based solutions. However, he says that the LED-based TOF system has a lower overall system cost.
“This break-through in high-frequency operation of Luxeon IR LEDs enables new TOF applications previously limited by cost or eye-safety constraints. This development will help to bring affordable and eye-safe distance measurements to a much broader range of products such as driver monitoring systems, logistics navigation, gesture recognition systems and drones,” Fancasali said.
The Lumileds LED illuminator comes in 60°, 90°, and 150° fields of view and for 850nm and 940nm wavelengths, by request, according to Wouter Schrama, Sr. Product Manager for the Luxeon IR Family at Lumileds.
“The joint evaluation kit with Melexis can help our customers reduce their development time significantly and enable them to successfully enter the market,” Schrama said.
“The Lumileds solution pairs well with our new Automotive QVGA TOF chipset and will help accelerate the adoption of TOF systems, at an affordable cost point; the performance of the system in terms of range and accuracy provides a compelling value proposition for the emerging TOF systems,” said Gualtiero Bagnuoli, product marketing manager at Melexis.
