Mannerisms

“I believe all light bulbs will disappear to be replaced by solid-state lighting. This is the next step in the lighting industry, for sure”, says van Houten.

However, selling LED lighting is not like selling conventional light bulbs. The solid state lighting market is, in many ways, a custom business.

For instance, NXP expects LCD TV backlighting will become the biggest LED application area by 2010 but, according to Edgar Langen, general manager of NXP’s solid state lighting division, it is not a straightforward plug-in replacement technology.

“For LCD TV you have to understand the topology. You have to know how many light points you want, or if you want to drive power saving, in order to determine the electrical topology”, says Langen, “different customers want different topologies, so they have to have different chips. So we make a custom chip for each customer.”

It is the same story in digital cameras where LEDs are used for the flash. “We developed specific drivers to maximize the light output, independent of the state of the battery”, said Langen.

So the electronics becomes vital to the LED lighting solution. “We develop intelligent drivers for lighting purposes. LEDs have a lot of nasty performance challenges. The colour wavelength LED is emitting is not stable, it changes over time, it is unpredictable in production, the amount of light emitting is unpredictable over time”, says Langen.

“To create a high quality light source you need to do a lot of manipulation around it,” continues Langen, “in order to create a constant light source, you need a lot of integration in the drivers: sensors, feed-back loops, algorithms. It’s an overall system solution.”

The biggest current market for solid state lighting is in backplanes for keypad displays and mobile phone displays, but other application areas are growing.

Traffic lights are being replaced with LEDs. Architectural lighting for the outside of buildings is going LED. Where there are lights which change colour it means, almost always, that LEDs are being used. Garden lighting is a significant area.

“Solid state lighting is entering the retail space”, says Langen, “allowing you to change the colour of the light affects the sales of goods. LEDs don’t emit IR so they don’t warm up the goods. They don’t emit UV so they don’t affect the colouring of goods.

“It will be used in gaming machines to add lighting experiences”, adds Langen, while conceding that fluorescent alternatives would remain cheaper until 2010.

The big challenge is the home. “Home lighting is coming. The main thing driving that is cost. It’s too costly to be deployed in the home”, says Langen. But NXP is focusing on ways to drive that cost down.

Solid state lighting has that greatest of all selling advantages today, it is green. It uses much less power for the performance it delivers than conventional lighting sources.

With that behind it, LEDs have a fair wind to the future.