Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Sept. 2, 2020. Notch another month of home time. It’s been more than a decade since the last time I didn’t spend Labor Day with family on beautiful Lake Martin in central Alabama. I just hope this year that here in San Diego we get through the weekend with minimal coronavirus backslide, because this region is amazingly swelling with vistors with an eye to the beach.
I made an announcement in our Focus On LEDs in Lighting newsletter last Thursday that I want to repeat here today because this newsletter has our largest circulation. We are very proud to announce a virtual event at the end of the month titled “Renaissance of Light Quality: SSL Industry Swaps Focus from Efficiency to Architecture.” We will present the online event live with Q&A and other participation opportunities for attendees over the course of Sept. 29–30.
Our premise is that we spent the prior decade focused mostly on the energy efficiency of solid-state lighting (SSL), and that LEDification phase was extremely important to the lighting industry and to global society. The next decade will allow us to really get LED-based lighting right in terms of light quality and luminaire form, and even embed SSL sources into the fabric of our world.
Our presentations at the Renaissance event will focus on this vision of quality, and lighting designer Teal Brogden will lead off with a keynote that considers the inspiration behind some of the iconic projects that HLB Lighting Design has undertaken. We will have sessions on sources, driving LEDs for quality, advanced luminaire design, and more. Register now and attend for free.
We have a number of interesting news items for you this week, starting with an intellectual property (IP) story. The University of California Regents have launched Round 2 in a licensing legal battle with major retailers and manufacturers of filament-style LED replacement lamps. The University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) is known globally for its work in LEDs and SSL, and asserts patents in the filament lamp space. The UC system started this action a bit over a year ago, and it has resulted in a significant number of licensees; the associated fees will fund additional research.
We have a contributed blog post written by David Shiller, who is a long-time participant in the LED and SSL sectors. He points out that many LED-based replacements for fluorescent tubes that target emergency lighting applications are missing a needed safety listing. Such TLED products need to comply with the UL 924 standard.
Our Mark Halper, meanwhile, has written an article about a new simplified network-control scheme being delivered by Aurora Lighting for residential applications. The concept is based on simplicity and a dedicated remote control with fixed-function buttons to control dynamic LED lighting systems.
In closing, I’ll repeat one other announcement from our Thursday lighting newsletter of last week. We have been deploying this LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter on Wednesdays and Fridays since January. But the pandemic has slowed the flow of news. For the foreseeable future, we will go back to a Wednesday-only deployment, although you can check our website daily for the latest breaking news. And we will still have a complement of vertical newsletters.
You will find many more stories of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. And always feel free to contact me to discuss content we post or to pitch a contributed article.
- Maury Wright, (858) 748-6785, [email protected]