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Bridgelux Inc of Sunnyvale, CA, USA has announced commercial availability of its NLX-5 high-power gallium nitride (GaN) LED chip.

As the firm’s fifth-generation chip, the NLX-5 offers a 15-20% performance improvement over its predecessors. When embedded in a customer’s standard cool-white LED package, the NLX-5 provides a typical light output of 85–90 lumens (at 350mA). As a result, it delivers the industry’s leading cost-per-lumen performance for warm-white, cool-white and RGB (red-green-blue) applications, Bridgelux claims.

The firm says that it continues to improve the performance of its LED chips based on a low-cost manufacturing technology that has been abandoned by others in the industry in favor of thin-film LED architectures, which ultimately are more complex and costly.

“By merging our innovative chip designs with traditional sapphire-based LED chip architectures, we’ve increased LED performance on a very robust, high-yield technology platform,” says R&D director Steve Lester. “Many companies have believed that high light extraction was only possible with the removal of the sapphire substrate. Our team has pushed the technology to achieve higher performance without sapphire removal and its typically negative impact upon yield and cost,” he adds. “Based on current R&D results, we project that, by later this year, we can provide an additional 10-15% improvement—with further anticipated performance improvements continuing over the next 12 months, utilizing this same high-power LED technology platform.”

The NLX-5 will provide a low cost-per-lumen solution to help speed market adoption of solid-state lighting applications into the general lighting market, says the firm. It claims that its chip technology is not only lower in cost to manufacture but also easier and more cost-effective to integrate into lighting products, either as single or multi-chip LED packages. The NLX-5 is suited to general lighting applications, such as street lights, architectural down lights, MR-16 lamps, as well as mobile phone and digital camera flash applications.  

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Visit: www.bridgelux.com