Published on: March 29, 2016

Just a few short years ago in the early days of so-called high-brightness LEDs, manufacturers offered a small selection of component options and left it to solid-state lighting (SSL) product developers to meld the components into the target application. Today, LED manufacturers offer products specific to most every application you can imagine, and in fact you can choose from high-power, COB, mid-power, CSP, and other options for the same general-lighting application. We have advancements in white and color components, and for that matter in UV and IR devices that emit outside the human visual range and that promise to enable amazing new SSL applications. Here we will review some of the most significant packaged LEDs announced in the past year with summaries of device characteristics, general device trends, and specific SSL application targets. - MAURY WRIGHT

Samsung Vivid COB LEDs

The chip-on-board (COB) LED-array landscape has proliferated broadly in the past two years, progressing from a product of convenience given the simple electrical, thermal, optical, and mechanical interfaces to products with enhanced optical properties. For example, Samsung brought to market several new COB lines in mid-2015 that have significant white-light and color-quality innovations. Most prominently, the Vivid COB Series is intended to make colors appear, as the name implies, more vivid. In many cases, LED and SSL module makers have used different emitter and phosphor mixes to enhance and even oversaturate colors such as red and blue.

Samsung is evidently not oversaturating the colors because the company said the Vivid LEDs would maintain a CRI rating of 90 and oversaturation is penalized in the CRI formula. The company said the Vivid COB LEDs combine improved tuning of the color spectrum and better phosphor control to "depict the red, blue, and green coloration of objects much more clearly." Samsung also added COB devices with smaller light-emitting surface (LES) areas - 6, 8, and 11 mm -to offer higher center beam candle power (CBCP) for directional lighting applications. Indeed, the products are generally 35% smaller at the same output levels relative to prior-generation COB LEDs from the company.

Samsung further announced a number of COB LEDs with what it calls Ultra-High Color Rendering, meaning a CRI rating of 95 or better.

<Source: LEDs Magazine>