Following quickly on the heels of Presentation Technology Reviews news article on Philips Lumileds LED luminance record setting, comes news from NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) that researchers have developed an LED that is seven times brighter than conventional LEDs (souce: Applied Physics Letters. July 17, 2006).

These recent technology breakthroughs give further credibility to Strategy Analytics recent report, “Now Showing on a Television Near You: LEDs are the Ones to Watch,” which predicts that LED-based backlighting will account for almost 25 percent of the total LCD TV market in 2010. LED backlighting offers advantages including increased color gamut, longer life and greater inherent environmental friendliness. Cost and power consumption negatives are being worked on.

The NIST team fabricated their gallium arsenide LEDs to be seven times brighter by etching ten nanoscale concentric rings around emitting area of the diode to create a unidirectional light source. An alumina mirror backing was used to reflect the emitted light upwards. The approach used resulted in about 41% of the total light generated being perpendicular to the LED as compared to the 2% without any surface treatment.

Lead Physical Review paper author Mark Su says the design principles are transferable to other LED materials and emission wavelengths, as well as other processing techniques, such as commercial photolithography.

It should be noted that the Physical Review paper is reporting on research. In comparison, Luminus Devices is currently shipping their PhlatLight PT85 and PhlatLight PT180 chipsets for high definition rear projection televisions. The chipsets are based on Luminus Devices photonic lattice light emitting diode (LED) technology.

M. Y. Su and R. P. Mirin, Enhanced light extraction from circular Bragg grating coupled microcavities, Applied Physics Letters. July 17, 2006.