SSL luminary and author of Haitz's Law has passed away at the age of 80, but his LED legacy will live long into the future through a revolution in lighting.
Haitz first publicly postulated Haitz's Law at the Strategies in Light conference in 2000. Long considered the parallel of the semiconductor industry's Moore's Law, Haitz's Law asserted an exponential increase in lumen output from packaged LEDs and a corresponding reduction in dollar per lumen. Moreover, Haitz projected that SSL products would reach efficacy of 200 lm/W by 2020. The projections have proven very accurate through the evolution of LED technology over the last 15 years.
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The most comprehensive account of Haitz's life and career achievements can be found on the QuarkStar website. QuarkStar is a startup focused on integrating optical features that can better control light distribution for SSL products. After presumably retiring from the industry, Haitz joined QuarkStar at the age of 76 and even filed his last patent not long before his passing.
Haitz worked for most of his career with Hewlett-Packard (HP) and companies that spun out of HP including Agilent Technologies, Lumileds, and Avago. QuarkStar noted that Haitz led the development of many light-emitting technologies that became very widely used in applications ranging from handheld calculators to exterior automotive lighting.
Still, it was Haitz's vision for how far LED technology would advance that stands out as we witness a global transition to LED sources in general illumination. And even in his final months, Haitz continued to look forward according to the QuarkStar account. In some of his last comments on SSL technology, Haitz said, "Solid-state lighting is where the Internet was in the 1980s. Just as we could not then have predicted what the Internet is now, 30 years later, we cannot foresee all that light and lighting will become in the next decades. We know simply that it will be wondrous and beautiful."
