LED technology by building the diodes on low cost silicon wafers

Recently, Intellectual Property Bank Corp (IPB) has announced its "Applicant Score Rankings" based on the company's proprietary benchmarks for technical competitiveness of manufacturers engaged in the LED lighting system business. According to IPB, a company that provides consulting related to intellectual property, Nichia Corp is the top manufacturer on a basis of competitive technology in the LED lighting system area.IPB said the "Applicant Score" evaluates the patent potential of the applicants based on the quality and quantity of the patents they have applied for led flood light. The rankings targeted companies, universities, research institutes and individuals that have filed applications related to LED lighting technologies with Japan's Patent Office. IPB's analyses are based on publicly disclosed patent bulletins issued during the period from January 1993 to February 2008.

The technique overcomes prohibitive costs of current LED technology by building the diodes on low cost silicon wafers, instead of currently-used sapphire.LEDs are said to be four times more efficient than conventional incandescent lights, more environmentally friendly than compact fluorescent lights, and have a far longer lifespan of up to 15 years.According to Purdue University researchers who developed the technique, LED technology could cut electricity consumption by 10 percent if widely adopted. Timothy D. Sands, the Basil S. Turner Professor of Materials Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering said "If you replaced existing lighting with solid-state lighting ... it could reduce the amount of energy we consume for lighting by about one-third."

Sands described currently-used incandescent bulbs as heaters, explaining that they convert only 10 percent of electricity into light, and the rest into heat. In comparison,led high bay light designed to emit white light operate at efficiencies ranging from 47 to 64 percent, but cost around 20 times more than conventional incandescent and compact fluorescent light bulbs.Current LEDs are built on sapphire and comprise of a light-emitting material called gallium nitride and a costly mirror-like collector to reflect light that ordinarily would be lost.Researchers expect the use of silicon to enable the industry to "scale up" the process, or manufacture many devices on large wafers of silicon, which is not possible using sapphire. Sands said Producing many devices on a single wafer reduces the cost.