Silicon to shed light on our lives soon!

Light bulbs are official now, as they are being manufactured using Silicon! Yes, the same Silicon, which is the basic building block of all the high-tech electronics around you! Officially called Solid State Light Bulbs!

Why are they struggling to have Silicon for everything and now lights?? Yeah, that's a genuine doubt!

We all know that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in 1880, and, since the 1920s, the incandescent light bulb has remained largely unchanged. While that's a testament to Edison's ingenuity, it's also a bulb that uses up to 95% of its power to generate heat rather than light.

Natural Silicon ~>


In order to improve this efficiency, the fluorescent bulb has recently gained popularity as an alternative; uses just about 25% of its power for light and lasts up to 10,000 hours, compared with the incandescent bulb's 1,500-hour lifetime! The incandescent light bulb has changed very little since it was first invented more than 100 years ago.

It hasn’t grown much more efficient over the years, yet it’s used today in some 4.4 billion of North America’s 7 billion fixtures—in large part because the challenge of developing an inexpensive energy-saving alternative has proved exceedingly difficult. While Compact Fluorescent Bulbs (CFLs) have caught on lately with their promise of energy savings, they’re still only about 20 to 25% efficient.

However, unlike the recyclable incandescent bulb, fluorescent bulbs contain phosphor and mercury - toxic chemicals that could pose disposal problems on a large scale.

Incandescent bulbs ~>


Good news is that a company called Group IV Semiconductor, from Ottawa, Canada, is hoping to cre ate a light bulb that further increases the efficiency of fluorescent bulbs, while using completely non-toxic materials!

Group IV has been working on a unique bulb design, one that uses a tiny computer chip in place of a traditional wire filament or gas.

The so called Solid State Light Bulbs use low-cost Silicon technology originally developed for fiber optic networks in the early 2000s. The chips were intended to boost the light signal, increasing its speed and allowing it to travel longer distances. As you know, today, it is being used everywhere including cell phones, computers, and other major electronic products!

What you do not know is that lighting is a whopping $12-billion global industry.



LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes)

Countries including UK and Australia have laws to ban incandescent bulbs by 2011.

Other countries, including the US, are considering the same. Fluorescent bulbs are currently the main replacement bulb. It is understood that solid state light bulbs could offer a non-toxic alternative, better lighting quality and higher efficiency than fluorescent bulbs!

While some types of solid state lighting exist, they are currently too expensive for mass production. For instalnce, LEDs use expensive semiconductors such as Gallium Nitride, rather than Silicon, and often give off an undesirable bluish color.

The challenge with using silicon is that the material is poor at emitting light. Working on the same, Group IV uses electrical current to energize electrons within silicon quantum dots, which give off energy in the form of photons.

They hope to have final prototypes of the technology by 2010, with bulbs on store shelves by 2011 that cost about the same as fluorescent bulbs! Thats good news.

Great news is that this has attracted several big investors, such as Vinod Khosla, the founding chief executive of Sun Microsystems. Also Applied Materials Inc., which makes manufacturing equipment, has plans to help Group IV ramp up production of the bulbs once the prototypes have been perfected.

Group IV also has plans to sell the microchip technology to major electrical companies such as General Electric, which will incorporate the chip in their own bulb production!






See the video of Group IV Semiconductor's ongoing innovative engineering for brighter and cost effective silicon world of light: