tl;dr: This is a constant-current driver for 3 strands of LEDS, up to 175 mA per LED, 200 mA total, with the LEDs powered by up to 25 V, with each strand having individual control lines. Available in a SOIC-16 package.
I’m always looking for LED drivers and other such circuitry. This part (one is automotive-grade, the other isn’t, but the automotive-grade is oddly cheaper) looked interesting and so I wired up the application note.
It’s a surface-mount part, but thankfully “just” an SOIC.
It seems at least vaguely OK with not burning itself up if you haven’t wired up all of the pins.
There’s an overall output enable (which you can use to cause the device to go into shutdown mode or to control the overall brightness of all three channels) plus individual PWM inputs. The PWM inputs can be connected to a switch or a microcontroller GPIO pin.
The outputs can be a string of LEDs instead of just one.
Compared to a Darlington driver like a ULN2003, the parts count is roughly the same. Either way, you need a resistor per LED. On the other hand, the ULN2003 requires you to calculate the correct resistor value for the voltage drop, whereas this will just let you set the mA power level. Presumably, you can use a resistor network of tiny resistors instead of a row of larger resistors.
The minimum pulse time is measured in microseconds, so it should be able to do fairly fast PWM. Easily in the tens of kHz range, suitable for a microcontroller’s hardware PWM pins.
Overall, probably not worth it for breadboarding or perfboard design, but probably handy the next time I’m driving non-intelligent LEDs and am making a PCB.