Fujitsu Laboratories announced the development of a technology that can embed ID data in light cast by LEDs or other light sources onto objects, and also recover this ID data from objects that have been lit in this way.

LIGHTFAIR® International (LFI®) will introduce the LFI Controls & Connectivity Forum and a host of Conference advancements as a part of the world’s largest annual architectural and commercial lighting trade show and conference, which will take place in New York May 3-7, 2015 (Trade Show: May 5-7; Pre-Conference LIGHTFAIR Institute®: May 3-4; Conference: May 5-7).

Union Tool Co, a cutting tool manufacturer based in Japan, will release a system that monitors an elderly person, etc by using an LED lamp equipped with a laser device in September 2015.

After releasing Pad Extension Chip (PEC) in 2013, LED chip manufacturer Epistar, has improved the technical and support system for the product, and now the product is applied in direct-type LED TV backlight, lighting and flash lights. Epistar’s PEC chips will be applied in large volumes in direct-type LED TV next year, with target products being 32 inch to 45 inch LED TVs. The company’s orders are mainly from China and South Korea, said Epistar Deputy Director of Marketing Center, Dr. Chiu-Lin Yao while attending LEDforum 2014 held in Taipei, Taiwan on Oct. 24, 2014.

Hi-Q-LED”, a publicly funded project coordinated by Osram Opto Semiconductors, has developed LEDs with an extremely high efficacy and a reduced drop in efficacy

Hubbell Lighting, a world leader in lighting innovation, announced today that Hubbell Building Automation (HBA) has become a Member of The Connected Lighting Alliance. The lighting world is on the eve of a paradigm shift towards wireless connectivity, and HBA’s industry-leading products offer the simplest and most convenient form of new lighting control.

Smart lighting emerged in recent years as a promising technology that has attracted investments from many institutes and LED companies, but further R&D is required before the technology can become truly human centric, said Pei-Ting Chou, Manager, Electronics and Optoelectronics Research Laboratories, ITRI, at LEDforum 2014, which was held on Oct. 24, 2014 in Taipei, Taiwan.

Improvements in lighting technology for light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs have increased lighting efficiency, or efficacy, as well as color quality. In September of this year, several manufacturers released ENERGY STAR®-qualified bulbs surpassing 100 lumens per watt. For comparison, traditional incandescent bulbs, which do not meet current light bulb efficiency standards and are no longer sold, provide 13 to 18 lumens per watt.

Cost effective communication solutions are important for long range smart streetlight applications to make it acceptable to potential clients, said Gary Tsai, R&D Director, Institute for Information Industry (III) at LEDforum 2014 last Friday at Taipei, Taiwan.

Price competitions are affecting almost every aspect of the LED industry, and are observed in manufacturers chip technology developments, such as the emergence of Chip Scale Package (CSP) LEDs.

Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan's largest and one of the world's leading high-tech research and development institutions, is pleased to introduce In-Line Compact Thermal Analyzer (ICTA) Technology. The world's leading automatic thermal analyzer, ICTA offers a measurement speed of 12,000 LEDs per hour, reducing each LED's component thermal resistance testing time to 0.3 seconds. This is 2,000 times faster than the traditional lab method where only six components can be measured per hour. ITRI will receive a 2014 R&D 100 Award  in November for this breakthrough technology in the "Imaging" category.

One of Osram’s ongoing projects to overcome LED efficacy limitations is the development of microrod 3D LED technology, said Michael Schmitt, Regional Market Director, Asia-Pacific, Osram Opto Semiconductors at LEDforum 2014 which was hosted by LEDinside on Oct. 24, 2014 at Taipei, Taiwan.

The days of glimpsing the world through a tiny plastic porthole when you fly are soon to be a thing of the past; future aircrafts will offer a crystal clear panoramic view without any windows at all. At the UK based Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), scientists and engineers are developing ultra-flexible, high-definition display technologies that could line the interior walls of cabins and display live footage from external cameras.

Cree achieves another fundamental breakthrough in lighting-class LED performance with the groundbreaking SC5 Technology™ Platform. The new platform powers the next generation of lighting with the introduction of Extreme High Power (XHP) LEDs. This new class of LEDs can reduce system costs by up to 40 percent in most lighting applications.

LED prices will continue to fall over the next few years, but this is a phase that will probably pass, said Sean Zhou, Regional Marketing Director, Asia, Philips Lumileds at LEDforum 2014, which took place Friday in Taipei, Taiwan. Manufacturers aiming to improve profits will be increasingly turning towards cost-effective technologies, such as flip-chip LEDs.

The phase-out of traditional incandescent bulbs in the U.S. and elsewhere, as well as a growing interest in energy efficiency, has given LED lighting a sales boost. However, that trend could be short-lived as key materials known as rare earth elements become more expensive. Scientists have now designed new materials for making household LED bulbs without using these ingredients. They report their development in ACS’Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Experts at Osram Opto Semiconductors will be taking the opportunity offered by the Vision Congress in Paris (October 14 and 15, 2014) to showcase an LED for car headlights which has a luminance three times that of existing versions. This means that a single LED can be used to provide a complete low beam. Several LED chips have always been needed in the past depending on the design and the type of LEDs used. The tremendous brightness is the result of a combination of UX:3 chip technology, ceramic conversion technology and high-current technology used in projection applications. In future it will be possible to design much smaller headlights – with every lighting function smaller than a box of matches.

Ford Motor Company and NextEnergy, one of the nation’s leading accelerators of advanced energy technologies, have teamed up on a technology innovation challenge for industry suppliers to help advance state-of-the-art automotive lighting.

Even as the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has enshrined light emitting diodes (LEDs) as the single most significant and disruptive energy-efficient lighting solution of today, scientists around the world continue unabated to search for the even-better-bulbs of tomorrow. Enter carbon electronics.

Duke University researchers have made fluorescent molecules emit photons of light 1,000 times faster than normal—setting a speed record and making an important step toward realizing superfast light emitting diodes (LEDs) and quantum cryptography.

Last October, the biologist and former GE Healthcare chief scientist James Rothman received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for solving the mystery of how cells shuttle molecules of insulin and other substances to the right place in the body. This year, two other former GE scientists looking for new sources of light, Bob Hall and Nick Holonyak Jr., almost felt the glow of a Nobel themselves.

Nanoco Group plc (AIM:NANO), a developer and manufacturer of cadmium-free quantum dots and other nanomaterials, announces that it has signed a follow-on joint development agreement with Osram, one of the world’s largest lighting companies, in connection with the use of Nanoco cadmium-free quantum dots in general lighting.

The Next Generation Lighting Industry Alliance (NGLIA) has recently released the third edition of  “LED Luminaire Lifetime: Recommendations for Testing and Reporting”. The alliance membership includes some lighting industry heavy weights including Philips, Cree and GE lighting. Below are some of the key recommendations from the report:

In a step that could lead to longer battery life in smartphones and lower power consumption for large-screen televisions, researchers at the University of Michigan have extended the lifetime of blue organic light emitting diodes by a factor of 10.

Princeton University researchers have developed a new method to increase the brightness, efficiency and clarity of LEDs, which are widely used on smartphones and portable electronics as well as becoming increasingly common in lighting.

The Illumination Engineering Society (IES) recently published a “position statement” (PS-8-14) which states that color rendering “requirements should not be a metric used in energy regulations to characterize color attributes for solid state lighting.” This unfortunate wording has caused unnecessary headaches within the lighting community, but what the well-intentioned IES meant to say was that the commonly used Color Rendering Index (CRI) metric is not entirely adequate and a replacement is warranted. We fully agree and are actively engaged with IES to improve this metric, but by no means should color rendering requirements be put on the sidelines while we all wait for improvements!

CEA-Leti and LUCIOM, which develops visible-light communication using light-emitting diodes (LEDs), have launched a project to develop high-data-rate LiFi transceivers. With this technology, LUCIOMexpects to offer in mid-2015 one of the first high-data-rate bidirectional light-fidelity, or LiFi, products that can work with different LED lighting sources, and on mobile devices.

A research team from Ritsumeikan University in Japan has developed a LED lighting system that can prevent unauthorized video recordings via mobile devices in public spaces.

Wearable devices are still in its early phases, where manufacturers can be creative in design. Ritot, a Ukraine-based startup has abandoned screen designs, who needs a LED or OLED screen displays if all the information you need can be projected onto your wrist?

Japan’s Fukuda Crystal Laboratory has successfully developed a 50 mm (about 2-inch) ScAlMgO4 (SCAM) crystal, according to a Chinese-language Nikkei Technology report.