Advantages

The use of INACKS integrated silicon stack chips offers the advantage of making communication protocols transparent to the engineer: no dedicated libraries are required, and no knowledge of protocol implementation is needed.

This results in significant time savings during the engineering stage, as engineers do not need to spend time understanding, implementing and testing the communication protocol.

These key time savings help lower engineering costs and accelerate the development of a minimum viable product or prototype, ultimately leading to a faster time-to-market.

The use of addressable LEDs requires strict adherence to microsecond and nanosecond-level timing, making software-based implementations challenging and consuming microcontroller resources such as timers, SPI, or PWM, while also keeping the CPU busy handling interrupts. Using an external dedicated chip offloads these tasks, freeing up system resources and significantly reducing CPU load—allowing the microcontroller to send new LED data in a much more relaxed and efficient manner.

Besides the internal resources required by a microcontroller for the addressable LED protocol implementation, an external dedicated pin is also needed. However, with the IS3750 controller chip, this constraint is eliminated, as the chip communicates via I2C. Since I2C is a multi-device communication protocol, no microcontroller pins are exclusively sacrificed for LED control. The IS3750 supports I2C speeds of 100kHz, 400kHz, and 1MHz, enabling good LED refresh rates even over I2C.

Another benefit of offloading addressable LED control to the IS3750 is the significant memory savings. Each addressable LED requires 24 bits (8 bits per color), meaning that controlling 1,000 LEDs would require 3,000 bytes of memory. Since the IS3750 features an internal memory of 3,600 bytes, it can drive up to 1200 LEDs without requiring the microcontroller to allocate that memory.

This series of resource savings (physical pin, internal peripherals such as timers, SPI or PWM, interruptions, and memory) allows the selection of a microcontroller with fewer features.

Additionally, the IS3750 features an easy-to-solder SO8N package with a 1.27 mm pin pitch, making it ideal for both oven and hand soldering while reducing the risk of pin short circuits during the soldering process.