Transparent, curved, 3D: ALIYOS™ LED-on-foil technology enables unprecedented effects in automotive lighting

Something important changed in consumers’ feelings about cars when the automotive industry adopted LEDs as a superior alternative to traditional incandescent bulbs. Of course, the adoption of LEDs – a development we have strongly influenced for many years – is attractive to car makers for solid engineering reasons: LEDs almost never fail, they use very little power, and they are small and easy to assemble into lighting units of many shapes and sizes. For all these reasons, car makers were happy to retire the incandescent bulb from active service. 

But beyond the good, practical reasons for adopting LEDs, emotion plays an equally important part. LEDs allowing car makers to associate a unique optical signature with their cars. Strikingly designed daytime running lights, a distinctive look for the rear lighting cluster, a unique blinking pattern in rear turn indicators: all became much easier to create after the introduction of LEDs. This means that it became common for the first time for car users to have strong preferences about the way that their car’s lights looked and operated. The best LED headlamps and rear lights became objects of desire. 

Nevertheless, the car manufacturer’s scope to make truly original lamp designs is constricted by the physical characteristics of a packaged LED, which must be mounted on a thick Printed Circuit Board. This restricts the freedom of design to a certain extent.

Introducing the new ALIYOS™ technology from ams OSRAM: this innovative LED-on-foil technology enables unprecedented effects in automotive lighting, effects where the light comes almost out of nowhere.

 

The ALIYOS™ technology pushes boundaries of multi-segmented area lighting and allows an individualization of light emission patterns. Characteristics like transparency, thinness and a high freedom of design differentiate our customer’s lighting solutions.
 
An ALIYOS™-based lighting unit can configure the segmented mini-LEDs to display symbols, words, images or abstract patterns, for the purposes of decoration, information or warning. Due to the special feature of transparency, several LED-foils can be placed behind of each other. A three-dimensional arrangement and the full brightness control of each segment in combination with the transparency of the modules enables completely new lighting and animation effects. 
 

The quality of light emitted by this kind of lighting assembly is excellent: the mini-LEDs are bright – output can be more than 10,000cd/m². Requirements of premium cars with respect to the main lighting functions are fulfilled.