Lumileds upgrades Luxeon I, reveals white lamps

At LightFair this week, high-power LED manufacturer Lumileds made several significant announcements concerning its Luxeon products.

The first announcement related to the company's flagship Luxeon I one-watt emitters. Lumileds announced a dramatic performance improvement in terms of light output for all InGaN colors (white, blue, cyan, green and royal blue) of the Luxeon I product line.

Perhaps most significantly, the quoted typical performance value for Luxeon I white emitters has been increased from 31 lumens to 45 lumens. Other colors have similar increases, all without increasing the package or chip size.

Lumileds' Keith Scott, Market Development Manager, explained to LEDs Magazine that this announcement is not a new product introduction. Instead, while the performance of Luxeon I has made steady, incremental improvements over recent months, Lumileds has continued to use the conservative typical value of 31 lm for its white product. Now, in order that customers are able to design fixtures using the correct light output values for each emitter, and also to keep pace with the competition, Lumileds has restated the typical performance figures at realistic values.

The improvements are due to incremental manufacturing changes, said Scott, contrasting this with the completely redesigned Luxeon package, now designated K2, which will be launched in the next few months (see No heat sink required for new Luxeon LED).

Lumileds says that prices for the improved Luxeon I LEDs remain unchanged and offer significantly more lumens per dollar representing an even better value. Luxeon I LEDs are immediately available from Lumileds Future Electronics in both Luxeon Emitter and Luxeon Star configurations.

Also at LightFair, Lumileds showcased its Luxeon III LEDs, which were recently upgraded to very high performance levels (see Lumileds Luxeon III reaches 190 lumens for red-orange).

Luxeon Lamps offer white color consistency

Uniform white light is essential in luminaires, but achieving a consistent color temperature with LEDs has been a major challenge because of the wide color variations inherent in the LED manufacturing process.

With this in mind, Lumileds introduced new color-matched white Luxeon Lamps that enable lighting manufacturers to quickly build LED-based luminaires with consistent white light for the first time.

Each lamp comprises multiple white Luxeon LEDs, which are selected by advanced binning algorithms applied during manufacturing. The result is that color uniformity within each fixture as well as from luminaire to luminaire.

The lamps are offered at correlated color temperatures of either 3200K (warm white), 4100K (commercial white) or 5500K (cool white). The matched Luxeons are mounted in multiple configurations offering light output levels of 500-1200 lumens and CRI similar to or better than conventional solutions. The products will offer lumen maintenance of 70% at 50,000 hours.

"The lighting community looks for white-point consistency whether viewing the light source directly or the effect that's being created," said Keith Scott. "Our Luxeon Lamps offer the first practical solution to the problem by supplying pre-matched, pre-mounted LEDs that not only provide the desired color consistency but also speed time to market for the finished product."

As well as addressing the issue of color consistency, the lamps also address cost, because the procedure of matching and selection allows Lumileds to use more of its production distribution.

Each lamp can be integrated with drivers, heat sink and optics to form complete lighting systems that deliver 1-2 year payback when replacing incandescent and halogen luminaires. Luxeon Lamps are suitable for a wide range of luminaires including track, recessed, display, cove, outdoor and other retail and exterior applications.