UPDATE: Cree’s MPL EasyWhite LED packs 24 chips into tiny package, obsoletes binning

With Cree’s announcement today of its XLamp MPL EasyWhite LED the company moves another step forward on its quest to eliminate “binning” from the vocabulary of LED lighting application designers.

The XLamp MPL Easy White can provide as much as 1500 lm at 250mA. This is a best-case number with a pulsed, rather than a constantly-on drive current, but with proper drive electronics and heat sinking, the LED can deliver the light output for a 3000 K, 75-Watt equivalent BR-30 light bulb, while consuming  78% less power than a traditional halogen bulb. (This performance meets the efficacy/lumen requirements for  integral LED lamps as defined by the Energy Star program.)

Note the top-side contacts for the MPL, freeing the LED from a pc-board for mounting. You can mount the MPL directly onto an aluminum heat sink.

Which is impressive, but just as important is how the EasyWhite series frees light application designers from having to worry about matching the color output of multiple LEDs in each light bulb fixture. Customers like to see a uniform color from lights: Imagine a string of track lights using the familiar PAR-38 bulbs, but with some lights a warm white and some a cool light. Distracting – and ugly. LED manufacturers have historically had difficulty in holding the LED chips to a uniform color output, and have sorted the chips into different color bins. Light manufacturers would mix-and match from different bins to get a uniform color, but this approach requires a large inventory of LEDs to meet the production lines need for a variety of bins. Plus, the whole idea of binning is confusing: Traditional light sources requires only two specifications: color temperature and light output. This simplicity of specification and inventory is what Cree is driving at by eliminating or at least reducing the need for binning.

Another problem with traditional multi-chip LED lighting designs is the appearance of several tiny dots of light as the source, called “pixellation.” The MPL eliminates pixilation because of the dense packaging of a large number of LED chips within the LED package: 24. I don’t know of any other LED that comes close to this number of internal LED chips: 4 is a common number. These are all packed into a 12×13mm footprint that Cree believes is 72% smaller than the next-smallest alterntive.

How does the MPL series fit in with the MC-E series of LEDs that Cree announced at the end of the year? The MC-E series, the first member of the EasyWhite family, can produce up to 560 lumens at 700 mA, and is a replacement for lower-power lights like 20 to 35-watt halogen light bulbs used in indoor lighting applications such as accent, track and pendant lighting. The MC-E has only four chips in its package.

UPDATE: Here’s the pricing information from two distributors:
http://www.arrownac.com/offers/cree/xlamp-leds.html  
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Cat=525057&k=mpl  

In volume quantities, expect the pricing to be under $20.