A new facility for growing Gallium Nitride – the key material needed to make energy-saving light-emitting diodes (LEDs) – has opened in Cambridge, enabling researchers to expand and accelerate their pioneering work in the field.
Gallium Nitride LEDs are already used in traffic lights, bicycle lights, televisions, computer screens, car headlamps and other devices, but they are too expensive to be used widely in homes and offices. The main reason for this is that they are normally grown on expensive substrates, which pushes up the price of LED lightbulbs. The new Gallium Nitride growth reactor at Cambridge will allow researchers to further improve a method of growing low-cost LEDs on silicon substrates, reducing their cost by more than 50% and opening them up for more general use.
LED technology is already so energy-efficient that it is estimated that the overall demand for electricity would fall by at least 10% if every home and business in the UK switched to LED lighting. This would save the UK over £2 Billion per year in electricity costs. Further developments planned in the new reactor would result in an additional £1 Billion per year electricity savings.
In addition, researchers are developing colour-tunable LED lighting, which would have the quality of natural sunlight, bringing considerable health benefits to users.
University scientists are also starting to investigate the potential of Gallium Nitride in electronics, which it is thought could have similarly significant energy-saving consequences – perhaps cutting nationwide electricity consumption by a further 9%.
The reactor, which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), was opened yesterday (Thursday March 28) by David Willetts MP, the Minister for Universities and Science. It marks the latest chapter in a decade-long research project to make LEDs the go-to technology for lighting, led by Professor Sir Colin Humphreys in the University’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy.
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Image: Gallium Nitride (GaN), grown on a silicon substrate, to manufacture light-emitting diodes. The material is critical to making LED lighting, which researchers and the Government agree could cut UK electricity consumption by 10-15%.
Credit: University of Cambridge Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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Low-cost LEDs for saving energy and improving health
29 March 2013
Gallium nitride has been described as “the most important semiconductor since silicon” and is used in energy-saving LED lighting. A new £1million growth facility will allow Cambridge researchers to further reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of LEDs, with potentially huge cost-saving implications.