LED Light Fixtures Coming To A Building Near You

Suppose you could change the color of your walls with a click of a button. Or maybe you would like your car to display your Twitter feed or Facebook page while you're on the road. Such futuristic ideas may soon be made possible due to the versatility of the Light-Emitting Diode (LED).

The discovery of electroluminescence—the phenomenon of charged electrons releasing photon, which powers LED—dates all the way back to 1907 at Marconi Labs. Different voltages were observed to create different visible effects, the color of the light produced corresponding to the "energy band gap of [a] semiconductor" like gallium or galena. The first functional LED was created by Oleg Losev, a Russian inventor, in 1927, although it would take several more decades to develop a broad commercial use. Texas Instruments would achieve a broader audience for the LED when they beat out General Electric, RCA and IBM to file a patent for it in 1962. Texas Instruments then introduced the SNX-100, a commercial LED that, over the next two decades, would come to be used in televisions, household appliances, and digital devices like clocks, watches and calculators. By the end of the twentieth century LEDs could be found in places and used in ways unimaginable to the pioneers of the technology nearly a century before.

Now commonplace in residential LED lighting, LED's flexibility in size and mood surpasses the capabilities of traditional incandescent bulbs and tubes. LEDs can be made to meet the lighting demands currently provided by incandescents, sometimes surpassing their range of function as in mimicking candlelight. Homeowners also value the reduction in energy costs which is provided by the added control over LED lights. Green-minded homeowners and businesses both have embraced LED light fixtures for their longevity and reduced radiation as heat, making for a smaller carbon footprint. The ratio of efficiency compared to an LED's relative shape and size, which can be as small as 2mm, presents another advantage over traditional incandescent light bulbs or tubes. As a result of these benefits, one can find LEDs almost everywhere today, in video displays, electronic billboards, aviation and marine lighting, vehicle lighting, optical communication, optical mice, barcode scanners, traffic signals, and scoreboards.

Experiments with LEDs in the present look to bring even more innovative applications in the next one hundred years. Currently in development is the flexible organic light-emitting diode (FOLED) by which a signal can be displayed on a thin 100 nm sheet of plastic allowing it to be bent or rolled without losing quality. FOLEDs would enable mobile devices and video displays to be shown on a curved surface and folded up when not in use. In the Netherlands, Philips have been working on a similar concept, textile-based LED (Lumalive), which would enable clothing and large decorative panels to react as LED does. One of the first uses of LEDs was optical communication, so it is not surprising that LED will continue to expand high bandwidth communication options, referred to as LiFi. The technology may even help space exploration, with studies being conducted to judge the efficacy of LED lights in growing self-sustaining gardens aboard spacecraft.

Skipping back to the present, we can see the path to these wonders in our future. 3M has developed a means, for instance, to allow a single LED to cover a large space, which they have named "Virtual LED."The future's rollable LED can be seen in the present's lighting fixture line by Osram which can be bent to wrap around exteriors or line interior spaces. Organic Lighting Systems constructs a similar product, a flexible LED strip coated with a polycarbonate resin which is said to provide improved clarity and control over the light emitted. With all that's happening now and all that is planned for the future, LEDs are sure to be turning up in a lot more places—maybe even on your living room walls.

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