Considerations for PWM Control of Automotive Lamps and its Modeling

PWM control is used to regulate the power supplied to automotive exterior lamps. This paper proposes several considerations for PWM control of lamps, which are power dissipation, lamp lifetime, V-I characteristics, duty ratio, inrush duration, slew rate, over current threshold and so on. These considerations cause some side effects such as overheating of switching devices, EMI/EMC, halogen cycles and so on. A Simulink model based on other studies is used to investigate these considerations. Design considerations are proposed based on simulation results.