May 28 2008
The general lighting industry can look forward to dramatic improvements in the manufacture and supportability of color-consistent, white power LEDs under a new technology roadmap for Lumiramic phosphor technology. As a kickoff to the new technology, an immediate reduction in the number of white color bins for the company's warm white LUXEON Rebel has been implemented.
“For all the acknowledged benefits of power LEDs, such as efficiency, sustainability, and durability, we believe that providing a supportable, high color-quality supply of white LEDs is the single biggest challenge facing the power LED industry and today Philips Lumileds is addressing this head-on with a superior technical solution for our LUXEON LEDs,” said Michael Holt, CEO of Philips Lumileds.
The binning of white LEDs is a “work-around” to manage the variation in white color and tint that are the result of today’s manufacturing processes. The inefficiencies of binning create structural vulnerability in the supply chain for the market. To date, there have been no solutions that decrease or eliminate this risk. The only way most manufacturers can consistently produce sufficiently large quantities of the desired bins for general lighting has been to increase the volume of white LEDs manufactured and discard those that don’t fit in the desired color spaces. However, this does little to address the supply chain risk and produces tremendous waste, the cost of which must be absorbed by the market.
Over the last 18 months, flux improvements have resulted in power LEDs delivering upwards of 80 lm/W. Light output and efficiency has been a primary obstacle to adoption. Now that solid-state lighting systems can outperform fluorescent, the industry must continue to improve the quality, consistency and availability of white LEDs. Philips Lumileds patented Lumiramic phosphor technology enables specific targeting for correlated color temperature which for the first time puts the manufacturer in control of the color temperature and tint and allows for production variance to be minimized. The new technology and production innovation from Philips Lumileds will result in a single row of white bins along the black body locus. Each bin will be sized to represent a total space no more than 3 MacAdam ellipses. Controlling the production process for white LEDs enables Philips Lumileds to accelerate growth of the general lighting market.
With a reduction in bin spaces for warm white already in place, Philips Lumileds will turn its attention to a similar reduction for neutral and cool white LUXEON Rebel products. When complete, the process to remove additional bins and shrink remaining bins on the black body locus will commence.