Ambient light sensor for smart home, robotics and automotive applications

Mouser is stocking the VCNL4100 proximity and ambient light sensor from Vishay. The high-sensitivity VCNL4100 combines a high-power IR emitter, photo detectors for proximity and ambient light, a signal-processing IC, and an 8-bit/16-bit ADC to provide long-distance proximity and presence detection up to 1m for smart home, robotics, lighting control, and vehicle detection applications. The sensor offers a five-fold increase in proximity detection over previous-generation devices. It’s integrated long-distance proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, and 940nm IRED eliminate the need for additional light barriers and optical alignment of the IR emitter and photo diode. The device’s small outline saves space and gives design engineers greater flexibility in where and how they locate the sensor. The device’s 16-bit, high-resolution ambient light sensor offers excellent sensing capabilities with sufficient selections to fulfil most applications whether a dark or high-transparency lens design. The devices offers individual programmable high and low-threshold interrupt features to allow designers to best utilise resources and power on the microcontroller. For the 8-bit proximity-sensing function, device has a built-in intelligent cancelation scheme that eliminates background light issues. It’s smart persistence scheme prevents false judgment of proximity sensing due to ambient light noise. The device provides temperature compensation of -40C to +85C to keep the output stable under changing temperature. Designers can easily operate proximity and ambient light sensor functions via the device’s I2C (SMBus-compatible) interface protocol. The device operates on a supply voltage range of 2.5V to 3.6V in a lead-free, RoHS-compliant 8mm × 3mm × 1.8mm package.