The Killer App

Abstract: Throughout its history, lighting technology has made tremendous progress: the efficiency with which power is converted into usable light has increased 2.8 orders of magnitude over three centuries. This progress has, in turn, fueled large increases in the consumption of light and productivity of human society. In this talk, we review an emerging new technology, solid-state lighting: its frontier performance potential; the underlying advances in physics and materials that might enable this performance potential; the resulting energy consumption and human productivity benefits; and the impact on worldwide III-V epi manufacture.