I'd like to drive a resistive heater using an IC operating at 3.3 V. The heater may need to dissipate up to 18 W, and will be powered by a 28.8 V battery. The IC is able to generate PWM signals, but driving the heater should be as little noisy as possible. Finally, the driver shouldn't dissipate too much energy.
To prevent switching the high current flowing through the resistor, and thus EM noise emission, I thought about putting a simple RC low-pass filter before the actual driver, which would smooth its input signal.
Now, for the driver itself, using a MOSFET would be easy, however they dissipate more power than bipolar transistors, so a Darlington pair might be more appropriate. Then, the issue of the high base-emitter voltage arises, since the PWM signal will have a 3.3 V amplitude.
What is the appropriate way to do this?