In late February, an innocent question raised by Grace Johnston from Scotland as to what color a striped lace dress her mother wore to her wedding on Tumblr went viral on the Internet. Celebrities and public were equally divided as to whether the dress was blue and black or white and gold, and the heated debate went on well into mid-March. Since the incident, there has been many theories ranging from genetics, optical illusion, visual perception, and poor lighting to explain the phenomemnon. LEDinside had an opportunity to speak to Bridgelux experts Maria Topete, and Aaron Merill, Senior Director of Channel Marketing about this rare visual perception phenomenon, and why this is so important for the retail lighting sector.

You may have recently encountered “GaN,” which is replacing silicon (Si) in some key applications for power conversion. In this blog series, “How to design with GaN,” I will take a look at how gallium nitride (GaN) is different from Si and what the key considerations are when creating a power design with GaN.

This is the fifth and final installment of Fairchild Semiconductor's series on LED lighting trends. In this entry, Fairchild Semiconductor experts will address PAR16,20,30,38 lamps. These lamp types are AC voltage input, power rating between 4W~20W, socket is screw type E26/27 or 2 pin type GU10, as shown in Fig. 1.

Both large department chain stores and smaller outlets usually fail to take advantage of the different options for interior and exterior lighting.

In a collaboration between LayTec and Prof. Dirk Rueter´s group at University of Applied Sciences Ruhr West a breakthrough has been achieved regarding the real-time monitoring of InGaN/GaN quantum well emission wavelength during MOCVD growth. It is well known that room temperature wafer based photoluminescence (PL) measurements provide an excellent forecast of the emission wavelength and emission intensity of the later LED devices. Recently, a prototype in-situ PL system worked simulatnneously with a LayTec Pyro 400 in a commercial multi-wafer MOCVD reactor. The related paper [2] was rocketed immediately to the status of  “most downloaded Journal of Crystal Growth articles”  from Science Direct. This  work is supported under grant KF3242801NT3 by BMWi (German Federal Government).

In Part III of Fairchild Semiconductors blog series on LED lighting trends we discussed MR11/16 Lamp LED Driver Design Challenges. Now we’ll look at A19, E14/17, E26/27 Bulb Lamp LED Driver Design.

Balazs Torok,  Petrol Station Key Account Manager at GE Lighting EMEA, shares some of his insights on how to brighten up petrol stations with proper lighting.

In Part II of our series on Solutions for Today’s Low Power LED Lighting Trends we listed the many regulatory and industry standards that designers need to account for in order to understand the design constraints of any given project for reducing power losses, power factor correction and low THD in the LED driver. In addition to the regulations and standards discussed, there are a number of other factors that need to be considered that can impact design. These include:

This is Part II in our five part series that takes a big picture look at today’s low-power LED lighting trends. In Part I we reviewed the worldwide market for LED lighting and predictions for the potential of high-brightness LEDs. In this installment we will look at some of the many driver standards and governmental agency requirements designers need to be aware of.

This is the first part of Fairchild Semiconductor's five part blog series that will examine LED lighting trends and Fairchild solutions. LED lighting applications fall into three basic input power levels: low-power is less than or up to 20 Watts; mid-power is between 20 Watts and 50 Watts; and high-power is above 50 watts. In the real-world, applications do not always fit nicely in these three buckets, but these power levels align when considering LED driver solutions.

Until now, the basic design of an LED lamp has remained fundamentally unchanged. The common formula has been to use a single, high power GaN chip (or a few larger chips), add phosphor (remotely or directly), and drive the chip(s) with as much power as possible to yield the maximum amount of white light. The key to the longevity of the lamps is to effectively dissipate the heat that is generated by the large LED chips. This is why so many LED lamps have large heat sinks added to the base of the lamps.

  Streetlights are being replaced from conventional technologies and converted into new LED solutions. This is not a new story but we are getting more and more information saying that the change to LED causes problems for people living nearby the newly installed LED streetlights. We at Lumia® would like to explain why this is not a problem for our streetlight solutions and how we are avoiding the issues faced by other streetlight brands.   

A breakthrough by a team of researchers from UCLA, Columbia University and other institutions could lead to the more precise transfer of information in computer chips, as well as new types of optical materials for light emission and lasers.

Now that we’ve flipped the calendar page to January, it’s a chance to celebrate that 2015 has been declared the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies (IYL 2015) by the United Nations. We don’t take this opportunity – pardon the pun – lightly.  This is for several reasons. First, our jobs revolve around light.  We work for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which is a telescope in space that observes X-rays from the Universe. X-rays are a kind of light. In fact, there are many different kinds of light, but only one that the human eye can detect naturally (called optical, or “visible,” light).

L.J. Star Inc., a leading supplier of sight glass lighting, has released a new white paper that explains why the wrong kind of vessel lighting can make a stainless steel vessel appear scratched or contaminated when it’s really not.

What is “Vapor Chamber” Vapor Chambers provide far superior thermal performance than traditional solid metal Heat spreaders at reduced weight and height. Thermal spread resistance is almost neglectable and thermal resistance is x times lower than (refer to copper, carbon nanotube compound, nano diamond compound). Vapor Chambers enable higher component heat densities and TDPs(Thermal Design Power) at safe operating temperatures, extending the components and products life.

Alessandro Farini, head researcher of the Visual Ergonomy Lab at the CNR-National Institute of Optics in Florence, Italy, shares in this UN International Year of Light blog entry the impact of lighting on visual perception.

The implementation and development of lighting standards has built up the market’s confidence in the Solid State Lighting (SSL) industry, according to a Leading Testing Laboratories (LTL) report. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has been working closely with standards organizations to provide technical support, covering product performance testing, statistical evaluations, data compilation, analysis, and related documents. Its goal is to quickly develop and implement required SSL product standards.

Even from space, holidays shine bright. With a new look at daily data from the NOAA/NASA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite, a NASA scientist and colleagues have identified how patterns in nighttime light intensity change during major holiday seasons – Christmas and New Year's in the United States and the holy month of Ramadan in the Middle East.

The holiday season is upon us, bringing decorations, festivities and holiday cheer! PECO offers the following tips and suggestions to get in the holiday spirit while staying safe.

A research article published 5 December describes a new light-based technology for measuring oxygen content in muscles while underwater, valuable information for competitive swimmers as well as patients using water-based therapies to recover from muscle injuries. Authored by researchers from the University of Essex and Artinis Medical Systems, the open-access paper appears in the current issue of the Journal of Biomedical Optics, published by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.

If LCD TVs start getting much more colorful — and energy-efficient — in the next few years, it will probably be thanks to MIT spinout QD Vision, a pioneer of quantum-dot television displays.

We live in a non-stop world where most of us are sleeping less than previous generations. The ready availability of artificial light has made it easy to work and socialize around the clock – leading many health professionals to question the impact this increased exposure is having on our wellbeing.

Purdue University researchers' success in using red and blue LEDs as the only source of light to grow ornamental plant seedlings indoors has led to a new phase of determining whether they can reduce production time with more colors.

Office lighting design plays a very important role in the office decoration. Most of people probably know that an appropriate and comfortable office lighting environment is extremely good and key for staffs’ work, body and mental health. However, with more and more using of computers and wrong office lighting design, many people’s eyes and body health are badly influenced.

Nowadays, people more and more care about health and always look for a variety of ways to do that. However, few of them know how important home furnishing LED lighting is to eye and skin health. Healthy home decoration is related to LED lighting, furniture layout, room and wall design.

As in Alice’s journey through the looking-glass to Wonderland, mirrors in the real world can sometimes behave in surprising and unexpected ways, including a new class of mirror that works like no other.

At present, LED illumination lamps and lanterns are more and more popular and pervasive with the explosive growth of LED industry output value. Moreover, people have fallen in love with LED lights and can’t leave them in daily life and work.

A smart headlight developed at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute enables drivers to take full advantage of their high beams without fear of blinding oncoming drivers or suffering from the glare that can occur when driving in snow or rain at night.

A UK solar light blog outlines some of the latest developments in solar LED surveillance lights. Solar Power LightsSecurity illumination is seen as one of the essentials to protecting your property. The instalation and running costs have now been shattered to make this aspect of security available to all. So have a look at the new lines of security lighting.