Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for May 5, 2021. There’s been something missing recently in my professional life. There has been a scarcity of packaged LED news even as other elements of the solid-state lighting (SSL) world have been active. This week brings relief, and I’m also editing a contributed article on LED details that we will share with you in the not-too-distant future.
This week, however, I wrote a mashup story covering three recent packaged LED announcements. In reality, they may have all deserved separate coverage but there’s this thing called time. Lumileds announced more tiny color LEDs in the Rubix family. Bridgelux has licensed the GE Current red-line phosphor technology. And Luminus has some new infrared LEDs for life-science and machine-vision applications.
The Bridgelux announcement is interesting in that GE Current has so closely protected the potassium fluorosilicate (PFS) red-phosphor intellectual property that the company has used for five years or more in its luminaires to improve color rendering with minimal efficacy penalty. We posted the press release in our Company Newsfeed with details on all of the LED models that will utilize the new phosphor and the applications targeted. Now LEDs that integrate PFS will be available from both Bridgelux and Nichia even to GE Current competitors.
Lumileds, meanwhile, continues to innovate in color LEDs and I find that topic extremely interesting. There are many applications for single-color LEDs such as emergency vehicles. But the real magic is in multi-channel systems. And the new Rubix LEDs offer some potential advancements in 4-, 5-, and 6-channel systems with the Lime and PC Amber components expanding color tunable range and enabling better, mixed-white light.
We also had an interesting automotive lighting story this week. It of course starts with an LED. But the innovation from LG Innotek is a flexible optical film measuring 0.2-mm thick that delivers custom and uniform light distributions. The technology is due on vehicles in mass production later this year and will deliver interesting geometric style.
Moving into the business sector, surely the ams-acquires-Osram saga will come to an end soon. But I think I have written that sentence before. Our Mark Halper has stayed at this one throughout the journalistic marathon. Mark reports that ams has made an offer to acquire the 28% of Osram shares that it doesn’t currently own. Presumably, ams will then delist Osram from the public market, change the combined company name to ams Osram Group, and begin reorganization.
Last week, I used a part of this space to tell you about ongoing changes with some of our events and programs related to the pandemic. In case you missed that, our Carrie Meadows did a far better job than I in describing the changes in a post from last Friday.
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]