Quickly designing a white LED

The advent of the white light emitting diode (LED), which consists of a blue LED with a phosphor layer, greatly reduces the energy consumption for lighting. Despite the fast-growing market, white LEDs are still being designed with slow numerical trial-and-error methods. A team of scientists from the University of Twente, Technical University of Eindhoven, and leading industry Signify (formerly Philips Lighting) have introduced a radically new design principle that is based on an analytical model instead of a numerical approach. The model predicts a white LED's color point for any combination of design parameters and allows for a much faster design, by up to a 1 million times, resulting in reduced design and production costs. The results are being published in ACS Photonics .