LED Lighting

The Sistine Chapel is now lit by LEDs, spectrally matched to excite the pigments used by Michelangelo, Botticelli and other artists working 500 hundred years ago. Since the 1980s, the chapel has been lit from outside through its 12 windows by a mixture of 150W spotlights and 1kW halogen projectors – 66kW in total, according to Osram which supplied the ...

Arbitrary-beam headlights are another step closer, claims a German consortium.  Cars already exist in which cameras shape the headlight beam around other road users – maximising light on the road while minimising dazzle. These adaptive headlamps are based on forward-facing cameras and shaped mechanical shutters within the headlight. With the advent of LEDs, headlamp developers have been trying to remove ...

Exar has announced an improved AC step driver for LED lighting applications. Combined with other iML offerings, the iML8684 provides a complete solution for LED light bulb and LED tube applications, the firm claims.

Cree has crammed up to 2,250 lm capability into a 5x5mm LED – achieved at 19W. The LED is called XHP50, the first in a family of XHP lighting LEDs. “At its maximum current, the XHP50 provides twice the light output of the industry’s brightest single-die LED, the XM-L2 LED, at a similar lumens per watt and without increasing the ...

Using a single super-power LED – 1,400 lm, emitting at 200Mcd/m2 – Osram has produced a dip headlight beam in its labs. The distribution of light indicates that car lighting standards can be met – see candela plot. “This LED has a luminance three times that of existing versions. This means that a single LED can be used to provide ...

Blue LED Nobel Prize winner Hiroshi Amano was visiting Leti GaN-on-Si micro-wire LED firm Aledia when he heard about the award. Amano is a member of Aledia’s scientific advisory board. The firm is a 2011 spin-out from French semiconductor lab CEA-Leti, developing intellectual property that allows LEDs to be grown on silicon wafers. It is not the only company trying ...

There is a varied and growing market for LEDs in wearable applications, ranging from head torches and miners’ helmet lamps, through backlighting for head-up and near-to-eye displays, indicators for sports and medical monitoring devices, to fashion accessories and clothing. While LEDs have already become a popular embellishment, like sequins or beads, in fashion garments, they take on a more functional ...

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics to blue LED inventors Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura. “In the spirit of Alfred Nobel the Prize rewards an invention of greatest benefit to mankind; using blue LEDs, white light can be created in a new way. With the advent of LED lamps ...

Lumileds has started to make multi-LED area and line light sources, based around 3535L surface mount LEDs on ridged and flexible PCBs. It is making the area products, described them as its ‘matrix platform’, at its plant in Penang, Malaysia. Luxeon XR (below) is the name of the rigid line, and the flexies are Luxeon XF (right). XR-3535L is first ...

Plessey has installed a surface-mount LED packaging line at its Plymouth semiconductor fab, which already has a GaN-on-Si LED wafer fab.