Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Feb. 3, 2021. The uptick in LED and solid-state lighting activity that we noted last week continues. And we’ll get to some of that in a moment. But first we should celebrate the fact that our LED sector received royal attention this week in the UK.
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (QEPrize) was bestowed on some of the luminaries of the LED sector going back to Nick Holonyak, who developed the red LED back in the 1960s and was among the first scientists to suggest that LEDs would ultimately be the most efficient way to produce white light. White-LED innovators and Nobel Laureates Shuji Nakamura and Isamu Akasaki were also recognized. Moreover, George Craford was recognized for development of the yellow LED as was Russell Dupuis for innovation in LED manufacturing processes. Congratulations to all!
Also while we are talking awards, our Sapphire 2021 portal is open. The Early Bird deadline is the end of the month. Get those entries started. In addition to our technology awards and Illumineer of the Year, we also have new Design Excellence awards for controls-centric projects sponsored by the Lighting Controls Association.
Moving to news, we have a project story focused on the new Kinder Building at the Fine Arts Museum, Houston (MFAH). Optics startup QuarkStar has supplied custom linear luminaires for the project and now has a flagship example of its Edge-X technology that precisely places light where desired. The 1-in.-wide optics hidden in a cove light 16-ft walls and the works on display at the museum.
We also had another museum project we covered from Belgium that I mentioned in our Focus On LEDs in Lighting newsletter last Thursday. The restored Gruuthusemuseum in Bruges now features all LED lighting.
Last week I promised another packaged LED story was coming, but it took me a few days to get to it. Osram Opto Semiconductors has a new line of high-power LEDs intended for outdoor applications that utilize mid-power-like packaging techniques but that are designed to compete with chip-scale package (CSP) LEDs. And in that prior sentence, there you have the reason I took a few days on the story. I didn’t understand the value proposition at first. Simplified, the value proposition is reliability and performance relative to cost. And now again this week I’ll promise another packaged LED story is coming soon.
We have also continued on our mission to deliver more guest columns and features published on a web-exclusive basis. This week we added an extremely thoughtful piece from David Ellingsen, founder of Metropolitan Plumbing, Electrical, and Air Conditioning in Australia. Ellingsen acknowledges the many benefits of LED lighting but advocates for care in deployment, especially as outdoor decorative lighting adds to over-lighting of our planet — a trend he calls Jevons Paradox. It’s a very interesting read.
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]