Intersil Releases Ambient-Light Vehicle Sensor

MILPITAS, CA /Marketwire/ -- Intersil Corp. introduced the "industry's first automotive-grade ambient light sensor designed to support continuous operation up to 105°C." The ISL76683 is qualified to the Automotive Electronics Council's AEC-Q100 grade 2, ensuring 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 A/D converter core provides onchip 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 50 Hz and 60 Hz 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.

Pricing and Availability
The ISL76683 is available now in compact (4.2 mm2) 6-pin OFDN packaging. Pricing starts at $1.25 each in 1000-piece quantities. An easy-to-use evaluation board is available to support customer evaluation. The board can be connected directly to a computer via a USB port, and the accompanying software allows the various device registers to be programmed. For more information please visit the company's Web site.

About Intersil
Intersil Corp. is a leader in the design and manufacture of high-performance analog, mixed signal, and power management semiconductors. The company's products address some of the fastest growing markets within the automotive, communications, computing, consumer, and industrial industries.

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