Lighting systems have a bright future

The landscape in automotive vision systems today is changing at a furious pace, driven not only by safety and design, but innovation across the wider photonics arena.

Today the sector can be seen to include not only lighting as we conventionally understand it, but also a wide range of technologies designed to enhance the visual information conveyed to the driver. This might range from including illumination through infrared sources as an integral part of driver assistance systems to the enhancement of head-up display information. Automotive lighting has moved a long way from simple incandescent and gas discharge based light sources in the search for solid-state technology in the form of light emitting diodes (LEDs) and organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and laser technology, and much of this progress can be attributed to the pace of scientific innovation in materials technology.