LUXEON CZ Color Line LEDs – Transforming the Ordinary to the Extraordinary

Color LEDs - A Growth Market

“The colour LED market is a big market – it’s growing and it’s growing fast!”

These were the words of Steve Barlow, Senior Vice President of the GM Illumination Business Unit at Lumileds, the simple introduction he gave when presenting his company’s new LUXEON CZ Color Line to distributors and sales partners in March of this year.

Whilst it may seem obvious to many of us that applications such as street or office lighting represent a great opportunity for the white LED market, Lumileds also reports that color LEDs are forecast to hit an average annual growth rate of 10% between 2015 and 2020, so it's hardly surprising that the company continues to lead the way in investment in color LED R+D.

LUXEON CZ Color Line – born from investment in technology

The LUXEON CZ Color Line is the result of Lumileds ongoing commitment to investment in LED technology and lighting solutions.

The company invests large sums in developing all aspects of the LED, from the epi to the phosphor, from colour conversion to the device architecture, and in ensuring that all those elements are brought together in robust, reliable and unique products that deliver practical solutions in the market place. The fact that the company has a worldwide portfolio of over 3,000 patents is a clear indicator that it sees research and development as its lifeblood, helping to differentiate it from other LED manufacturers.

The Color Palette

The Lumileds color LED range includes a portfolio of direct emitting colors, including blue, royal blue, cyan and green, also with AllnGap technology are red, red-orange and amber. As part of its investment in technology, the company is focusing on developing higher current densities, offering customers solutions with bigger punch and performance.

To meet growing needs for a wider color palette, the company also continues to invest heavily in phosphor technology, in the research of new phosphor materials and in the manufacturing of its own phosphors, resulting in a best-in-industry range of phosphor-converted colour points, including amber, mint and lime and unique, differentiated phosphor solutions.

The Die and the Package

It’s not just about the epi. Lumileds understand that a wide palette of higher density LEDs only adds value for customers if the die and the package are robust and reliable.

The company continuously focuses efforts on improving technology that underpins extraction efficiency out of the package, and on tackling the fundamental intrinsic droop within the device architecture, working to develop solutions for improved colour uniformity across the entire die surface.

Higher density, no crosstalk, better thermal resistance

As I mentioned above, Lumileds is continuously developing higher density solutions and the LUXEON CZ Color Line offers up to 48% more punch than other undomed emitters, making them the perfect solution for applications where high power is essential.

Just as significant, the LUXEON CZ Color Line benefits from a small source size. This results in a narrow beam width which reduces halos when mixing colours. LUXEON CZ LEDs have also been designed to ensure that light is forward-directed, so that it doesn’t affect surrounding LEDs, eliminating the cross talk challenges and scattered light associated with domed emitters and making them ideal for tightly packed applications.

Focal length is the same across all of the colors, which allows smooth, consistent colour mixing, and facilitates faster design, and importantly, LUXEON CZ’s thermal resistance is around half that of competing products on the marketplace.

Architecture and Entertainment

The LUXEON CZ Color Line is already popular among designers because it meets a specific, growing requirement for a wider colour portfolio of higher density LEDs.

Whilst colour LEDs are increasingly being designed into a wide range of applications, in the automotive and aerospace industries for example, two key areas that Lumileds is targeting with the Color Line range are architecture and entertainment. More and more, high power colour LEDs are being used to project colour onto buildings from a distance, transforming public spaces and historical icons around the world.

One prominent example that Lumileds gives of an iconic structure being transformed is the Times Square New Year’s Ball in New York, where for its 100^th anniversary redesign LUXEON color LEDs were used to illuminate the crystalline triangular facets that make up the panels of the Ball, with white LEDs added to highlight the skeleton of the geodesic shape. The overall result was to create the effect of a sparkling gem above the square, beaming moving patterns out across the New York skyline.

According to Jennifer Holland, Product Line Director of the Lumileds Color Porfolio, color LEDs have become “an integral part of the concerts and theatres you attend, energising these venues with vivid colours,” and for Lumileds, one of the main attractions of color LEDs, and a driver for growth in the color LED market, is that they appeal to designers and architects, a group of influencers who act as advocates for the new technology with the wider selection of colors and possibilities it offers, because, to quote Holland, “they continuously want to develop something new, creative and different.”

The Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball was just one of series of innovative installations using Lumileds Color LEDs that have taken place around the world over recent years. Watch this video to see some more:

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