I say that it is easy to build your own EL backlight driver. The chip to use is the IMP803. Here is a link to the data sheet for this part. IMP803 Data Sheet. I worked on a project where this chip was used to drive an EL strip. The standard circuit was changed so that we could drive a PWM signal from the microcontroller to adjust the backlight intensity. Here is a schematic that shows how our design was configured.



Michael Karas