Old materials are leading to new innovations for LED lighting

Once again it’s good old silicon — the basis for computer chips, cheap solar panels and even next-gen materials like thermoelectrics — that’s leading to some of the most promising innovations for the future of lighting tech: LEDs. Over the past couple of years, companies making light-emitting diodes for lighting using silicon wafers have begun to commercialize these efforts, leading to more and more of these cheaper, efficient LEDs out there.