A (very) brief photo-summary of what you can do with HB LEDs

Yesterday (Thursday) was EDN’s Designing with LEDs Workshop held in Santa Clara, CA, and I had the pleasure of talking with several of you PowerSource readers there. Thanks to all of you who stopped me to talk about the conference or this blog. I’ll write in another post about the panel discussion with the Big Three LED manufacturers: Cree, Lumileds, and Osram.

I needed to prepare some opening remarks and slides for the Workshop so I thought I’d post them here for those who wanted to attend but couldn’t. (And thanks to those who couldn’t attend at the last minute and let me know – that freed up seats for others.) Since I don’t have the time constraints here, this a bit longer than what I shared at the Workshop. 

The poster-child application for high-brightness LEDs currently is Solid-State Lighting, and this is because of its potential to provide more efficient, more effective light. Since in the US lighting can account for as much as 20% of the total energy consumption, any technology that can reduce energy needs will grab headlines.

However, as with all new technologies, there’s a time when the initial excitement gives way to actual design considerations, and there are some real challenges associated with LED lighting: Power control, thermal management, and optics all affect the cost, efficiency, and lifetimes of LEDs. [Thursday] at the Workshop we [had] some of the foremost experts in these fields giving keynotes, papers, and workshops.

But in addition to basic design considerations, I hope you also come away thinking about new markets and products that can go far beyond the solid-state lighting market, important though that is. HB LEDs can extend a product’s branding and reach in whole new ways. Let’s look at a few of the ways that LEDs are making branding an inherent part of a product or even a venue.

The WaterCube swim stadium  in Beijing became an icon for the Summer Olympics. The Watercube combined exotic architecture with integrated color was made possible by HB LEDs. By changing colors the entire venue took on a whole new look.

Automotive lighting seems like a natural for LEDs, but notice that the first place they’re being used in the headlamps is not for illumination but for branding.

The Audi A-4 uses these outlining LEDs,  called “eyeliner” for branding – when you see an Audi coming at you, you immediately know what car it is. Porsche also uses them, as well as the Escalade, and it screams out “high-end car”. But do you think that 5 years from now, say, the Honda Fit will have eyeliner? Probably.
 

Interestingly, the Tesla electric roadster, which could really have benefitted from LEDs ruggedness and low-power consumption, was designed before HB LEDs were readily available. 

The GM plug-in hybrid Volt, which has an all-electric range of 40 miles and is due in 2011 is supposed to have all-LED headlamps.

But let’s move away from branding to whole new products enabled by LEDs, such as tiny display projectors, often called pico projectors.

Here’s a picture I took at last year’s CES show, where Texas Instruments, a major player in MEMs ICs for the projector market, was clearly testing out the market for a handheld projector. And yes, I held it and yes, it got really hot.

What can you do with a small projector that fits inside a cell phone or music player? Well, you can use it to play multi-player games, or interactive virtual environments. Or, as this bicyclist does, you can define personal space with it.

Moving into medical applications, endoscopes are an obvious use for a tiny, powerful illuminating device, but what if you shrank everything down so small it becomes a swallow-able camera?

Let’s get a little wiggy and look at the world of fashion (Keeping in mind that the fashion industry does $250 Billion gross revenue in the US annually. Compare this to the consumer electronics industry, at about $150B.) Everything is illuminated, even clothing.

Again, an image from the 2008 Summer Olympics, where protesters used LED “thowies” to unfurl a LED-encrusted sheet and stage a stealth protest. (Wait till social unrest meets high-lumen pico projectors. Or urban graffiti artists, or just plain-ol’ outdoor advertising.)

And finally, here’s a bar in New York that supposedly relies on its rooftop windmills to power the multi-hued bar

We won’t didn’t have any presentations on designing swallowable LEDs or battery-powered dresses, but the information presented Thursday did point attendees in the right direction for designing the next generation of LED-based products. Over the coming weeks I’ll be posting questions and answers from the panel discussion, and at the end of May we’ll post the keynotes and papers in a voice-over-slide webinar format.