Article Abstracts | December 2005
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Reducing Uncertainty in Precision High-Brightness LED Measurements
The growth in the market of high-brightness LEDs has made the development of accurate and precise tools and the methods to measure their performance all the more critical.
by Richard Young, Alexandre Y. Fong and Alan Tirpak,
Optronic Laboratories Inc.
Dramatic improvements in the performance of LEDs and other solid-state lighting sources over the past five years have produced unexpected growth for this sector of the photonics industry. Advancements in output performance and operating efficiencies as well as innovations in volume production have resulted in aggressive price competition. Manufacturers offer standard products with outputs of upward of 100 lm/W for single devices and even higher for multiple-LED component engines (Figure 1).
LEDs can be found in applications ranging from architectural and entertainment lighting to the flat panel displays that account for almost one-third of their recent growth. Tim Carli and Robert V. Steele of the research firm Strategies Unlimited in Mountain View, Calif., report that the high-brightness LED market expanded from $300 million in 1997 to $1.8 billion in 2002 and to $3.7 billion in 2004. The firm forecasts that it will rise to nearly $5 billion by 2007 and to $7 billion in 2009.
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