Soraa announced today the world’s most efficient LED, which it will integrate into the market’s first full-visible-spectrum, large form factor lamps. Soraa’s third generation (Gen3) GaN on GaN LED achieves world-record setting wall-plug-efficiency, outperforming the nearest competitor by 20% at normal operating conditions. In just one year, Soraa has achieved a remarkable 30% increase in white lumen per watt (lm/W) efficiency over its prior generation LED. Soraa’s Gen3 LED will be available in the second quarter of this year in a variety of product offerings: modules, large form factor PAR and AR lamps, and MR16 lamps.
Soraa’s full-visible-spectrum PAR30L lamp, powered by its Gen3 LED, will lead the market not only in light output, but also in color and whiteness rendering; at CRI-95 and R9-95 it will achieve center-beam intensity (CBCP) of 28,250cd at 8° beam angle, 10% higher than the CRI-85 offering of the nearest competitor. Soraa’s large form factor lamps will feature all the signature elements of light quality that its customers are accustomed to: natural and accurate rendering of colors and whiteness, perfectly uniform beams of exceptionally high intensity, and clear single shadows.
“We have achieved a 30% lm/W efficiency improvement over our previous generation white LEDs, and what’s amazing is that we expect to repeat these significant year-over-year performance gains in the future,” said Jeff Parker, CEO of Soraa.
Soraa will display its new full-visible-spectrum large lamp products at Strategies in Light in Santa Clara, California (February 25-27, booth #805) and Light + Building in Frankfurt, Germany (March 30-April 4, booth# 4.1 B55).
Lab results are great, but didn’t Cree already show something much higher than this in their lab? Soraa benefits from a higher IQE due to their violet pump (lower wavelengths have higher efficiency by the default physics), but suffer conversion loss at the phosphor to make white, more than Cree who makes blue LEDs to make white. Therefore, Soraa has farther to go to make a good LED than the other companies who are already making them. Once Soraa can quote lm/W rather than strange, ghostly percentages and candlepower numbers they’ll be better off.
SORAA’s MR16 12 volt lamp (Vivid 2 & Premium 2) produces good light quality but a lot needs to be done to reduce the high levels of RF interference. The radio frequencies are far to high and you can expect digital signals to be totally disrupted affecting TV and radio signals. This won’t happen with other expensive LED lamps.
The absence of absolute efficacy performance data and lack of clear reference of the bench mark against which the relative data has been achieved, along with the extensive use of vague terms makes the article pretty unconvincing.
It would be nice to see wall-plug efficiency value for the commercial product.
On SPIE 2014, several companies including EpiStar, Toshiba etc., announced about 60% wall plug efficient LEDs with several price-cutting innovations.
E.g., Toshiba does it on 8-inch Si substrates, EpiStar developed what they called high-voltage LEDs getting rid of bulky and expensive circuitry in the their bulbs (with only 70% g weight).