Recent Developments in White Light Emitting Diodes

In the recent years solid state lighting based on LEDs has revolutionized lighting technology. LEDs have many advantages over the conventional lighting based on fluorescent and incandescent lamps such as mercury free, high conversion efficiency of electrical energy into light, long lifetime reliability and ability to use with many types of devices. LEDs have emerged as a new potentially revolutionary technology that could save up to half of energy used for lighting applications. White LEDs would be the most important light source in the future, so much so that this aspect had been highlighted by the Nobel committee during the award of 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics. Recent advancement in the fabrication of GaN chip capable of emitting in blue and near UV region paved way for fabrication of white LED lamps. Mainly there are two approaches used for preparing white emitting solid state lamp. In the first approach blue light (lambda = 450 nm) emitted from the InGaN LED chip is partially absorbed by the YAG: Ce3+ phosphor coated on it and reemitted as yellow fluorescence. A white light can be generated by the combination of blue + yellow emission bands. These lamps are already available. But they are suffering from major drawback that their Colour Rendering Index (CRI) is low. In the second approach, white LEDs are made by coating near ultraviolet emitting (360 to 410nm) LED with a mixture of high efficiency red, green and blue emitting phosphors, analogous to the fluorescent lamp. This method yields lamps with better color rendition. Addition of a yellow emitting phosphor improves CRI further. However conversion efficiency is compromised to some extent. Further the cost of near UV emitting chip is very high compared to blue emitting chips. Thus cost and light output wise, near UV chips are much inferior to blue chips. Recently some rare earth activated oxynitrides, silicates, fluorides have emerged as an important family of luminescent materials for white LED application because they can emit visible light strongly under blue light irradiation. These are chemically, thermally and mechanically stable materials with high efficiency to down convert blue radiation into green and red. Efficient white light can be generated by coating these phosphors on blue LED. CRI of white emitting LED lamp can be improved significantly if green and red emitting phosphors are coated on efficient blue emitting LED chips. In this approach CRI will be maintained if appropriate combination of red, green along with blue emission is used. This article reviews some recent developments in phosphors for white light emitting diodes.