Could your lighting system give hackers what they need to steal your personal information…and more? Yes, can be the answer, depending on the design of the specific system involved and the quality of the installation. So says a panel of lighting-and-cybersecurity experts assembled by the National Lighting Bureau for its Annual Lighting Forum – this year titled “Shedding Light on Light” – produced in conjunction with the EdisonReport.

As the lighting industry continues to make the transformation from commodity lamp supplier to strategic lighting partner, the old financial structures and purchasing patterns are no longer fit for purpose.

We have heard it for a while now – “with the advent of LEDs, retrofit lamps are on their way out, and the future belongs to dedicated products such as integrated fixtures”. Today I’d like to take another look at this prediction.

How much attention do you really pay to your energy use? “Lots of attention, I’ve installed a smart meter in my home,” you might cry. “It’s great, I’ve been able to see just how little it costs to run the tumble dryer!” See the problem here? We can develop all the technology in the world but we’ve still got a long way to go when it comes to overcoming the biggest barrier to a sustainable future – us!

Healthy lighting … it’s not just for your home. In fact, it’s not just for the planet earth! Or humans, for that matter. Here are five innovative biological correct lighting applications currently helping humans and certain aquatic creatures lead fuller, happier lives in a variety of environments, earth and non-earth.

Kees van der Klauw, Senior Vice President at Philips Research shares his insights on smart city streetlights in this blog entry. Within ten years, two out of three people will be living in urban areas, many of them in big cities, which means – now more than ever – that these cities need to be functional and sustainable.

This article is part of GE series on the Internet of Things to mark GE’s participation as a Diamond Sponsor of the IoT World Congress this week in Barcelona. Disasters like the L’Aquila earthquake, which shook central Italy in the early hours of April 6th, 2009, can cause widespread damage and take lives.

If your infant consistently fights sleep, you definitely notice that, but you may no notice cognitive changes at first. The changes can be subtle, but maybe you notice your child’s attention span getting shorter. Perhaps they are easily distracted. These symptoms are all common experiences for many parents struggling with a sleep-fighter.

Visual Lighting Communication (VLC) systems are attracting players outside of traditional lighting designs, such as Disney Research.

When Chris Carlen developed an enthusiasm for flashlights containing high-power LEDs, he didn’t anticipate that his hobby interest would lead to the creation of a new, high-speed LED driver delivering lighting performance that exceeds that of conventional sources at a fraction of cost.

More than ten years ago, Osram Opto Semiconductors supplied infrared laser diodes for the first laser sensors in cars. As one of the first suppliers of powerful infrared LEDs (IREDs), Osram has also accompanied the development of camera systems with additional infrared illumination since their inception. Up to now, these optical sensors have been connected to one assistance system each, but from now on they will play an important role in automated driving in combination with other technologies. With the help of the optical sensors, the self-driving car captures its surroundings, and makes decisions using the data it has gathered.

Recently, quantum dots (QDs)—nano-sized semiconductor particles that produce bright, sharp, color light—have moved from the research lab into commercial products like high-end TVs, e-readers, laptops, and even some LED lighting. However, QDs are expensive to make so there’s a push to improve their performance and efficiency, while lowering their fabrication costs.A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has recently produced some promising results toward that goal, developing a new method to extract more efficient and polarized light from quantum dots (QDs) over a large-scale area. Their method, which combines QD and photonic crystal technology, could lead to brighter and more efficient mobile phone, tablet, and computer displays, as well as enhanced LED lighting.

Ferroelectric materials have applications in next-generation electronics devices from optoelectronic modulators and random access memory to piezoelectric transducers and tunnel junctions. Now researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology report insights into the properties of epitaxial hafnium-oxide-based (HfO2-based) thin films, confirming a stable ferroelectric phase up to 450 °C. As they point out, “This temperature is sufficiently high for HfO2-based ferroelectric materials to be used in stable device operation and processing as this temperature is comparable to those of other conventional ferroelectric materials.”

When discussing the properties of LEDs, the word ‘color’ immediately comes to our minds; and there are so many facets to our perception of color! An important one is color consistency, which is really a blanket qualifier for a variety of phenomena. Today, I will discuss color consistency at the level of the LED component (i.e. the white emitter including an LED die and phosphors). Keep in mind, though, that this is only part of the story, and eventually the system-level behavior is what matters.

Over the last decade, advances in the technology of light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, have helped to improve the performance of devices ranging from television and computer screens to flashlights. As the uses for LEDs expand, scientists continue to look for ways to increase their efficiency while simplifying how they are manufactured. 

Researchers at the Hanover Centre for Optical Technologies (HOT), University of Hanover, Germany, have developed a self-contained fiber optic sensor for smartphones with the potential for use in a wide variety of biomolecular tests, including those for detecting pregnancy or monitoring diabetes. The readings of the sensor can run through an application on a smartphone which provide real-time results. When properly provisioned, the smartphone-user has the ability to monitor multiple types of body fluids, including: blood, urine, saliva, sweat or breath. In case of medical applications, the sensor readings can be combined with the GPS signal of a smartphone and users can then be guided to the next drug store, hospital or the ambulance.

All of us have, at some point or another, complained about the use of lumens as a metric – for a variety of reasons. First, lumens are not very accurate as a proxy for perceived brightness. Second, there is a temptation to increase lumens by ‘cheating’, for instance on the chromaticity of a lamp – ponder this next time you are subjected to a depressingly greenish fluorescent lamp! Third, the lumen race pushes the industry to compromise on competing aspects, especially color rendition. If two LEDs emit the same number of optical watts, but one generates more long-wavelength photons to properly render deep-red tones, it is by definition penalized in terms of lumens.

Wired technology is now largely a thing of the past. We now use wireless networks and new for faster computing and communication devices. But where do we go next? Every day we read another article that suggests the future is closer than we think. Whether it’s artificial intelligence, robots in the home, or technology that will make today’s ‘supercomputers’ as outdated as the dinosaur.

The latest research from the Niels Bohr Institute shows that LEDs made from nanowires will use less energy and provide better light. The researchers studied nanowires using X-ray microscopy and with this method they can pinpoint exactly how the nanowire should be designed to give the best properties. The results are published in the scientific journal, ACS Nano.

The retrofit and relight business is in full swing today. A variety of new LED replacement luminaires, retrofit/conversion kits and lamps are available from a variety of manufacturers and whether we are talking about a T12 to T8 fluorescent conversion or fluorescent to LED, the economic value proposition and project mechanics are well understood.

A few years ago it became clear that the LED signage industry needed a change. Fundamental shifts in LED technology, plus continual breakthroughs in software and hardware, and new innovations in competitive digital screen technologies, will force the LED sign manufacturer to adapt or die.

The last Soraa blog post discussed various consequences of driving LEDs, an inherently DC component, with alternative current. Today,Soraa Chief Scientist Aurelien David takes a closer look at one of the most infamous of these: flicker. Flicker is a hot-button topic these days, and one where LEDs tend to struggle.

A Si quantum dot (QD)-based hybrid inorganic/organic light-emitting diode (LED) that exhibits white-blue electroluminescence has been fabricated by Professor Ken-ichi SAITOW (Natural Science Center for Basic Research and Development, Hiroshima University), Graduate student Yunzi XIN (Graduate School of Science, Hiroshima University), and their collaborators. A hybrid LED is expected to be a next-generation illumination device for producing flexible lighting and display, and this is achieved for the Si QD-based white-blue LED. For details, refer to "White-blue electroluminescence from a Si quantum dot hybrid light-emitting diode," in Applied Physics Letters; DOI: 10.1063/1.4921415.

General lighting applications for LEDs continue to accelerate in China, thanks to improvements in LED power, efficacy and quality, as well as new government mandates that seek to replace conventional incandescent lighting with solid-state sources. According to market analyst TechNavio, China’s LED lighting market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 26.9% between 2013 and 2018, making the country one of the globe’s largest potential markets for LED lighting. However, as the technology matures, pressure will grow on LED lighting OEMs to offer more differentiated lighting designs within increasingly stringent cost constraints. 

As year-round tourist hot-spots, many European seaside towns find that the influx of tourists brings its own unique set of challenges. In order to address safety concerns and minimise the impact on residents, city councils look to make infrastructure investments that improve both the energy efficiency and local ambience of the area.

With the rapid development of global economy, energy and environment has become one hot topic discussed by us. So far, energy and environment problem has been one of the important factors that retrained economic development. Under such circumstances, many countries have launched key lighting projects and in addition carried out RELEVANT incentives and rebates program. As the 4th generation light source, LED is characterized by energy-efficiency and eco-greenness. LED incentives and rebates programs have risen around the world. Here bellow is the introduction to LED incentives and rebates in some major countries.

In this GE blog entry, Walter Kraus, the chairman of the Li-Fi Consortium, sheds insights on the different Li-Fi technologies available to the market at the moment.

The Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has released a new guide for contractors and specifiers who are replacing existing fluorescent troffers with new LED troffers or retrofit kits.

In this blog entry from Soraa, the company addresses some of the challenges the LED industry faces when it comes to applying and explaining the different metrics to LED consumers.

No more packaging – Package-less Package. That is the fundamental solution which LED manufacturers are looking for to meet the market demands. Unfortunately, the era of Flip Chip-Chip Scale LED Package (FC CSP LED) is, however, emerging. It will make the time of the wide spread of LED light coming slowly step by step. Any LED manufacturers who aggressively jump over FC CSP LED and current leading-edge packaging technologies would be expected under the paradigm of no more packaging. A little of endeavour has been conducted to fulfil package-less package like Phosphor on Die and Package Free Chip.