TABLE OF CONTENTS No book focused on an evolving technology would be complete without considering where we might be going with respect to future technology. In this chapter, this author looks into his crystal ball and attempts to predict a few fresh developments that can be expected to occur in the development cycle of light-emitting diode (LED) technology. Some of the topics we will discuss in this chapter were previously mentioned in this book, whereas other topics may be pure speculation based on educated guessing by this author. Regardless of the topic, the intention of this chapter is to make readers aware of the growth potential for the use of LEDs. That growth potential is envisioned by this author in three key areas: lighting, communications, and display.
In this book we carefully examined the present state of LED-based lighting. In doing so, we noted that the LED lightbulb has the potential to replace compact fluorescent light (CFL) in approximately the same manner as the CFL lightbulb is replacing the incandescent lightbulb. However, when we discussed the evolution of the LED lightbulb, we primarily focused our attention on its extremely low power consumption, and its relatively low output of light in comparison with other lighting sources. In this section, we will focus our attention on the latter and note how LED-based bulb manufacturers are attempting to provide more light output per bulb.
There are basically two methods being used by LED bulb manufacturers to increase lighting. Those methods are increasing the LED...
