"New Scientist reports that a British team has overcome the obstacles to cheap LED lighting, and that[b] LED lamps as cheap as CFLs will be on the market in five years. [/b]
Quoting: 'Gallium nitride cannot be grown on silicon like other solid-state electronic components because it shrinks at twice the rate of silicon as it cools. Crystals of GaN must be grown at 1000C, so by the time a new LED made on silicon has cooled, it has already cracked, rendering the devices unusable. One solution is to grow the LEDs on sapphire, which shrinks and cools at much the same rate as GaN. But the expense is too great to be commercially competitive. Now Colin Humphreys's team at the University of Cambridge has discovered a simple solution to the shrinkage problem. They included layers of aluminium gallium nitride in their LED design... These LEDs can be grown on silicon as so many other electronics components are. ... [b]A 15-centimetre silicon wafer costs just $15 and can accommodate 150,000 LEDs making the cost per unit tiny.'[/b]"
original article
Cool, although I still support/ed LEDs being pushed even if pricier. Now give me my LED camera flash and house lighting at decent colour temp spectrums dammit! And road lights that aren't sickly orange!
Photography Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Wait a minute... one of my housemates is doing a PhD in the gallium nitride research group in Cambridge and she hasn't mentioned this. Nor as of a couple of days ago were they able to crank out flawless gallium nitride wafers in short timeframes
Apparently nobody can see you without a signature.
Steel wrote:Wait a minute... one of my housemates is doing a PhD in the gallium nitride research group in Cambridge and she hasn't mentioned this. Nor as of a couple of days ago were they able to crank out flawless gallium nitride wafers in short timeframes
Ignore that I was just being unobservant... she mentioned it was going to be on tv tonight
Apparently nobody can see you without a signature.
Gallium is needed for new generation PV cells along with indium. With the costs of these materials going up by multiples in recent years, I expect switching over to pure LED lighting would put even more strain on the mining corporations in trying to expand their reserves, especially in this current climate. Although gallium is the 61st most abundant element in the Earth's crust, it is not abundance that is the issue, but rather affordability in extraction and feasibility. Remember, a lot of computing hardware requires these metals too, which aren't recycled half as much as they should be from disposed components.
