New UVC LED Performance Benchmark Promises to Revolutionize Disinfection

Global public health concerns have heightened following reports of disease outbreaks from food or water contamination in restaurants, retail and hospitality businesses. Alarms are also raised from recent incidences of “superbug” infections and persistently high hospital-acquired infection rates. As pathogens acquire drug resistance and becoming more virulent, the public needs a proven prevention technique to ensure safe food, clean water, and sanitized air in homes and shared spaces in urban areas. Ultraviolet C-band light-emitting diode (UVC LED) is now increasingly recognized as a technology-of-choice that offers effective, universal and chemical-free protection.

Germicidal UVC LED supplier Bolb Inc., based in Livermore, California, has announced further advancements of its high performance UVC LEDs featuring record 250mW single-chip performance during a technical presentation given today at the SPIE Photonics West Conference held this week in San Francisco, CA.

Bolb is the first—and so far the only—LED company in the world to overcome one of the most difficult engineering challenges in making UVC LEDs: producing a crystal structure fully transparent to UVC light for maximum output efficiency. The company’s latest high-power UVC LEDs have delivered industry-leading efficiency, offering 250 mW of single-chip optical output at the optimized disinfection wavelengths of 265-270 nm. This unprecedented single chip output power is achieved at 500mA drive current with a forward voltage of 5.8V. Even higher power can be achieved with multi-chip arrays.

Such advancement promises to enable ubiquitous distributed disinfection solutions for a highly contaminated world. Many businesses and equipment providers face a critical need to control dangerous, and sometimes multi-drug resistant pathogens in their products, workplaces, and facilities. UVC LED-enabled fixtures can be used in hospitals and schools, pharmaceutical and food manufacturing plants, horticulture, water utilities, and in homes and many other types of businesses.