AC-powered LEDs Could Cut the Cost of Lighting

Engineers at Pennsylvania State University have demonstrated a practical way to integrate gallium nitride LEDs and their power supply circuits onto the same chip using industry-standard manufacturing processes. The result is a lighting chip that runs directly from the AC electricity supplied by a wall outlet, with no need for the intermediate step of converting the electricity to low-voltage DC on separate silicon chips and other components. The Penn State engineers describe the work in IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.