Energy Focus, a fiber-optic and LED lighting provider, said Tuesday it would develop LEDs for the U.S. Army to replace rockets flares which are used to provide infrared light to soldiers wearing night vision goggles on the battlefield.

The Solon, Ohio-based company said it has won a grant from Department of Defense to do the research. The LED it's to be developing is supposed to provide lots of infrared light but little or no visible light —  to provide infrared illumination of enemies on the battlefield while keeping U.S. soldiers under cover of darkness, and should beat the flares on performance and reliability.

A solid-state electronics system is surely more reliable than a burning flare, and the risk of ground fires from falling flares are also eliminated, which is the point of the research, said Energy Focus in the announcement on Tuesday without disclosing the sum of the grant.

It isn’t the first government contract for the company. In November 2007 it won a $1 million contract to work with DuPont and the University of Delaware to work on using fiber optics to concentrate light on high-efficiency solar cells. And last year it won two more grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).