iDrive™ 1000 Powers LED Grow Lights

As promised in the LED Grow Lights 1000+ Lumen LED post, here is one of many Bench Power Supplies posts for working with the latest generation UHB LEDs. This is one of the best Solid State Lighting PSUs on the market, and should be on every DIY LED Grow Light bench.
( Radiant Research- please send over an engineering sample for test and review purposes, I will pay for shipping and duty! )


Integrated System Technologies, a leading European LED driver design manufacturer, has released the new 210 Watt 3 channel iDrive™ 1000 LED driver. The driver is a natural extension to the current iDrive™ range which includes the 3 channel 350mA driver, the iDrive™ Lite. Both products incorporate patented Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM) drive technology and ColourCool™, a thermal management system to ensure optimum LED output and life.

The new iDrive™ 1000 delivers an industry leading level of energy efficiency provided through new patent pending technology which delivers twice the power density of the iDrive™ Lite. The breakthrough in combining high power density with leading PSU efficiency ensures the iDrive™ 1000 has a small footprint and does not require large heatsinks.

A new feature enables iDrive™ 1000 users to choose the forward current, independently on all three channels between 500mA-1000mA. This exclusive feature introduced to the high power LED market place enables users to select the forward current digitally by channel for optimum LED performance. Each channel’s forward current can be precisely varied in 50mA steps via the LED display panel. Unlike most solutions in the market, there are no external DMX address switches making it very quick to install and configure. The 1000 provides an increased forward voltage range up to 55V per channel to allow for the increase in forward voltage in high power LEDs when driving these products at higher currents. Additional features include a master/slave option, increased internal preset programmes and user selectable thermister settings for desired fixture lumen maintenance in any environment.

The iDrive™ range uses patented technologies that differentiates it from all LED drivers on the market, in addition the drivers will only supply the correct forward voltage required by each LED channel and compensates for voltage drop over long cable runs thereby optimising the energy required to drive the LED fixture. This makes the iDrive™ solutions the most intelligent and power efficient drivers on the market, providing a significant advantage to all SSL manufacturers that are serious about reducing the carbon footprint of their lighting product range.

Sales Director Matt Fitzpatrick said, “Since we launched the iDrive™ Lite in March 07, it has been received fantastically by the market place however, the design team are extremely excited about the potential of the iDrive™ 1000. There is choice globally for drivers in the 350mA 3 channel class but there are no 210 Watt high efficiency drivers that allow the user to vary the current on each channel between 500mA-1000mA. With many of the high power LED manufacturers now delivering product that is optimised at 700mA and 1000mA drive currents, we now feel that the iDrive™ 1000 will give the SSL manufacturers a high quality power supply solution and allow them to efficiently get more lumens for their money”.

The iDrive™ 1000 will be available in volume from September 2007 with engineering sample available in August
Dimensions 200mm x 150mm x 70mm
Weight 0.8Kg approx.
Compatible with all high power LEDs

About Integrated System Technologies Limited
IST Ltd is a professional lighting group company specialising in the development of innovative lighting solutions for the general, wide area, architectural and entertainment lighting industry. It offers over 20 years of experience in traditional and solid state lighting including award winning electronic and optical system design for a variety of lighting products from controllers to luminaires.

Radiant Research Ltd is the solid state lighting division of IST which designs and manufactures advanced solid state lighting products from LED light engines through to driver solutions. All LED driver technology designed and produced by Radiant Research incorporates our unique patented technology Colour Cool™ (GRANTED in UK & USA) to ensure optimum LED efficiency of multiple channel systems. This unique and patented driving technology uses Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM). This technique provides optimum colour mixing (RGB/A/W) and full additive luminosity which, integrated into our closed loop temperature monitory system, ensures optimum LED output regardless of environmental conditions.

Goldeneye Allowed LED Lighting Color Conversion Patent

Goldeneye, Inc., creator of light recycling technology and the world’s brightest LED light sources, today announced the allowance by the U.S. Patent Office for its patent of a new color conversion method for LEDs utilizing a solid luminescent element. This “wavelength conversion chip” can be used with Goldeneye’s recycling light cavity or attached directly to any LED. The patent covers both methods of manufacture and a wide range of applications in solid-state lighting. The technology described in the patent enables Goldeneye’s next generation of LED light products to produce white, yellow, green, red and a spectrum of visible colors from blue or ultraviolet LEDs.

"This technology will enable significant improvements in efficiency and color rendering as well as greatly simplifying binning requirements”, says Scott Zimmerman, Vice President of Technology for Goldeneye. “It also delivers life and thermal performance that powdered phosphor approaches simply cannot match.”

This patent will add to Goldeneye's already strong IP portfolio, enhancing the company’s ability to manufacture and license technology in virtually all solid-state lighting applications. It encompasses ceramic processing techniques such as tape casting and sintering to form thin luminescent sheets for volume production.

In Goldeneye’s basic technology, multiple LEDs are combined in a “light-recycling cavity” to enhance their individual brightness output. By incorporating the conversion chip in this arrangement, the individual LEDs can operate at lower drive levels with improved optical efficiency, unlike other high brightness approaches that rely on overdrive conditions. The result is a light source with a longer lifetime, greater wavelength stability and superb color uniformity.

“Our early work in the area of very high intensity LED sources forced us several years ago to develop a new type of wavelength conversion technology compatible with these high flux levels”, says Zimmerman. “The conversion chip will enable all of Goldeneye’s high brightness LED light products to operate at greater efficiency than in other conversion schemes”.

About Goldeneye

Goldeneye, Inc. is a technology foundry and light product manufacturer focused on optical solutions to the solid-state lighting market. The company is headquartered in Carlsbad, California.

LED Grow Lights from Inexpensive Polarized Light



Advances in Creating Inexpensive Polarized Light May Lead to Better LED Grow Lighting

UCLA chemists working at the nanoscale have developed a new, inexpensive means of forcing luminescent polymers to give off polarized light and of confining that light to produce polymer-based lasers.

The research, which could lead to a brighter polarized light source for LEDs in laptop computers, cell phones and other consumer electronics devices, currently appears in the advance online edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The research was conducted by UCLA professors of chemistry and California NanoSystems Institute members Sarah Tolbert and Benjamin J. Schwartz, and colleagues, including Hirokatsu Miyata, a research scientist with Canon's Nanocomposite Research division in Japan. The research is federally funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research and privately funded by Canon.

The researchers have succeeded in taking semiconducting polymers — plastics that consist of long chains of atoms that work as semiconductors — and stretching them out in a silica (glass) host matrix so that they have new optical properties.

"If you have polymer chains that can wiggle like spaghetti, it's hard to make them all point in the same direction," Tolbert said. "What we do is take tiny, nanometer-sized holes in a piece of glass and force the polymer chains into the holes. The holes are so small that the spaghetti chains have no space to coil up. They have to lie straight, and all the chains end up pointing in the same direction."

Because the chains point in the same direction, they absorb polarized light and give off polarized light. Lining up the polymer chains also provides advantages for laser technology, because all the chains can participate in the lasing process, and they can make the light polarized without the need for any external optical elements, Tolbert said.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Schwartz was one of the original discoverers in the 1990s that lasers could be made out of randomly oriented semiconducting polymer chains.

"Our new materials exploit the fact that the polymer chains are all lined up to make them into lasers that function very differently from lasers made out of random polymers," Schwartz said.

The manner in which the polymer chains incorporate into the porous glass of the silica matrix helps to confine the light in the material, enhancing the lasing process by producing what is known as a "graded-index waveguide." In most lasers, confining the light is typically done with external mirrors.

"Our materials don't need mirrors to function as lasers, because the material that's lasing is also serving to confine the light," Schwartz said.

In combination, the alignment of the polymer chains and the confinement of the light make it 20 times easier for the new materials to lase than if a randomly oriented polymer sample were used. And because polymers can be dissolved easily in solvents, they are inexpensive to process. The glass host matrix with the aligned nanoscale pores is also inexpensive to produce.

"Usually polarized and cheap don't go together," Tolbert said.

The research opens the possibility of additional applications for the new materials as a brighter polarized source for displays in products with LED-type displays, including cell phones, laptops and Palm Pilots.

"If you take an inexpensive light source with which you could excite the aligned polymer chains and get the chains to reemit, you potentially have a more efficient way to generate polarized light." Tolbert said. "This would allow displays to be brighter with less power consumption, and you could get longer battery life."

Tolbert has collaborated with Canon for years on the development of this class of new materials.

In addition to Tolbert, Schwartz and Miyata, co-authors include UCLA researcher and former postdoctoral scholar Ignacio Martini, UCLA chemistry graduate student Ian Craig, and UCLA chemistry graduate student William Molenkamp.

UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 37,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 300 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Four alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Cree Prototypes 1,000+ Lumen LED chip

Cree breaks 1000 Lumens on a single die!

The next post should be about LED Grow Light bench power supplies that can handle the additional power requirements of the emerging next generation solid state lighting chips.

With a driving current of 4A, the company's prototype, single-die LED delivers a light output of 1,050 lumens in cool white, a level comparable to a standard incandescent bulb, and 760 lumens in a warm-white version.

As a result, the company claims this breakthrough may lead to the development of LEDs that will make traditional light bulbs obsolete.

Efficacy of the cool-white LED is 72 lumens/Watt and, for the warm-white device, 52 lumens/Watt.

Both versions allegedly operate at significantly higher efficacy levels than conventional light bulbs.

Solid State FUV LEDs reach 210nm

These new Far-Ultraviolet (FUV) leds are great news for the many in the Bio Industries:

A joint research group led by Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (Riken) and Saitama University developed a UV-LED with an emission wavelength as short as 227.5 nm and an output of 0.15 mW.

Thus far, another research group has reported the development of a UV-LED with an emission wavelength of 210 nm, but its output was only 0.02 μW. In addition to the prototype unveiled this time, the research group of Riken and Saitama University succeeded in prototyping UV-LEDs with a wavelength of 253 nm and an output of 1 mW, 261 nm and 1.65 mW, and 273 nm and 3.3 mW.

According to the group, the outputs of these UV-LEDs are substantially equivalent to those of blue, red and white LEDs used in electric lamps. And the outputs are on a level such that these UV-LEDs can be used as-is in germicidal lamps.

With a view to applications for sterilization, water purification, medical care and the high-speed degradative treatment of pollutants, etc., the research group intends to further enhance the efficiency and output of its latest UV-LED.

The prototype UV-LED uses an AlGaN semiconductor. The UV-LED was obtained by first forming an ALN layer on a sapphire substrate, and then forming an n-type AlGaN layer, AlGaN emitting layer (triple quantum well structure), p-type AlGaN layer, etc. stacked on one another by crystal growth.

The research group upgraded the crystal growth method of the AlN layer provided on the sapphire substrate to enhance the output. According to the new method, multiple AlN layers are formed by alternately using two different growth methods.

First, an AlN layer is formed by continuously supplying the Al material while intermittently supplying (i.e. supplying in a pulsed manner) ammonium gas. Then, another AlN layer is formed by continuously supplying both the Al material and ammonium gas.

This crystal growth method is called the Ammonia pulsed supply multiple layer growth method. The method resulted in (1) a decrease of threading dislocation density in the AlN crystals, (2) an increase in flatness of crystal layers and (3) a reduction of cracks due to the distortion in the crystals.

Because the quality and flatness of the AlN layer was improved, other layers formed on the AlN layers also resulted in higher quality and flatness, thereby enhancing the emission intensity (output) from the AlGaN emitting layer. The emission intensity was increased to approximately 50 times that obtained by the existing AlN layer formation method.

The latest UV-LED was an achievement by Hideki Hirayama, the head of Terahertz Quantum Device Laboratory, Terahertz-wave Research Program, Frontier Research System of Riken, and Norihiko Kamata, professor of graduate school of science and engineering, Saitama University.