SmartLighting involves communication and sensing functions that enable remote control (turning on or off, dimming or changing colors) and monitoring (remote diagnostics) of one or more fixtures in a building, street or home. Intelligent lighting also provides information to the luminaire so that it can be adjusted for brightness depending on usage or ambient light. On the other hand, high-brightness white LEDs are ideal for area lighting applications, with better directionality, better color quality, and environmental protection, and can be more easily controlled to turn on and off, allowing automatic detection of ambient light to change brightness. It is gaining more and more attention in applications such as smart LED street lights.
Intelligent lighting communication can be achieved with wireless or existing power line infrastructure. The power line is the world's largest copper infrastructure, with power outlets in every corner of the home or office building, making it an extremely wide-ranging network.
Since all lighting fixtures are connected to the power line to convert electricity into light, power line communication (PLC) has become a reasonable way to communicate the main communication and control links of intelligent lighting.
Using its advanced semiconductor technology, our semiconductors have introduced intelligent lighting solutions including communications, sensors, KNX transceivers and protection solutions that help perform the same (or even more) tasks with less power, further improving energy efficiency and saving energy.
For example, using our semiconductor PLC modems (such as AMIS-49587), PLC line drivers (such as NCS5650) and ambient light sensors such as NOA1302, we can easily build a networked LED street light intelligent control system based on power lines, which helps municipalities, Power companies and commercial enterprises remotely adjust the light output of street lights to reduce the overall energy consumption of their street light networks. In addition, in building intelligent temperature regulation and lighting control applications, KNX transceivers can also be used on twisted pair cabling to control lighting with the KNX network.
Power line communications help utility companies add a higher level of functionality to their distribution networks, allowing consumers to better manage their own energy consumption. Our semiconductors offer a range of leading spread-spectrum frequency shift keying (S-FSK) PLC modems such as AMIS30585, AMIS49587 and NCN49597. Among them, AMIS-30585 and AMIS-49587 are based on ARM7 core microcontroller (MCU), only support AC work, the maximum baud rate per channel is 1.2k and 2.4k respectively; the newly introduced NCN49597 is based on ARMCortexM0 core MCU, and supports AC and DC work, the maximum baud rate per channel is 4.8k, supporting the Cenelec A, B, C and D bands, and providing programmable software. It is also expected that the NCN49599 PLC modem with integrated power amplifier function based on NCN49597 will be launched in the second half of 2012.
These rugged narrowband PLC modems embed PHY+MAC, comply with strict international standards (FCC, CENELEC, IEC61334-5-1) and operate on low and medium voltage networks to provide the best bill of materials (BOM) cost and Very low energy consumption.