Tokyo illuminated by white LEDs

Feb. 18, 2008
The White-LEDs conference in Tokyo provided a unique opportunity to meet key players in Japan's LED lighting industry, writes Tim Whitaker.
The First International Conference on White LEDs and Solid State Lighting took place in Tokyo on November 26-30, 2007 and featured an international line-up of speakers, as well as solid representation from Japanese companies.

For non-Japanese speakers, this offered a rare and very welcome opportunity to meet with many companies and researchers that have made a significant contribution to the field.

One such contributor is conference chairman Tsunemasa Taguchi of Yamaguchi University, who said that the event was intended to increase mutual understanding among international researchers on the latest research findings on white LED lighting.

"For future development of lighting applications, we will need the definition of infrastructure and international performance standards for white LED lighting technologies and systems," he said. "In order to accelerate the LED lighting system and design concept, market and culture, we also need the good collaboration among semiconductor engineers, lighting engineers and lighting designers in the world." The follow-on event in this series will be held in December 2009 in Taiwan.

It goes without saying that Japanese countries were, and continue to be, at the forefront of white LED development. In fact, Taguchi pointed out that it was already 10 years since the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) funded the Japanese national project "The light for the 21st century", which started in 1997.

This was an excellent conference offering a huge wealth of information, but we have decided to focus here on presentations from various Japanese companies.

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This article was published in the January/February 2008 issue of LEDs Magazine.

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