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Imec, a research and innovation hub in nano-electronics and digital technology, announced today that it has developed 200V and 650V normally-off/enhancement mode (e-mode) on 200mm/8-inch GaN-on-Silicon wafers, achieving a very low dynamic Ron dispersion (below 20 percent) and state-of-the-art performance and reproducibility. Stress tests have also shown a good device reliability. Imec’s technology is ready for prototyping, customized low-volume production as well as for technology transfer.

GaN technology offers faster switching power devices with higher breakdown voltage and lower on-resistance than silicon (Si), making it an ideal material for advanced power electronic components. Imec’s GaN-on-Si device technology is Au-free and compatible with the wafer handling and contamination requirements for processing in a Si fab. A key component of the GaN device structure is the buffer layer, which is required to accommodate the large difference in lattice parameters and thermal expansion coefficient between the AlGaN/GaN materials system and the Si substrate. Imec achieved a breakthrough development in the buffer design (patent pending), allowing to grow buffers qualified for 650 Volt on large diameter 200mm wafers. This, in combination with the choice of the Si substrate thickness and doping increased the GaN substrate yield on 200mm to competitive levels, enabling low-cost production of GaN power devices. Also, the cleaning and dielectric deposition conditions have been optimized, and the field plate design (a common technique for achieving performance  improvement) has been extensively studied. As a result, the devices exhibit dynamic Ron dispersion below 20% up till 650 Volt over the full temperature range from 25°C to 150°C. This means that there is almost no change in the transistor on-state after switching from the off-state, a challenge typical for GaN technology.

“Having pioneered the development of GaN-on-Si power device technology on large diameter substrates (200mm/8-inch), imec now offers companies access to its normally-off/e-mode GaN power device technology through prototyping, low-volume manufacturing as well as via a full technology transfer” stated Stefaan Decoutere, program director for GaN technology at imec. “Next to enhancement mode power device switches, imec also provides lateral Schottky diodes for power switching applications. Based on imec’s proprietary device architecture, the diode combines low turn-on voltage with low leakage current, up to 650V – a combination that is very challenging to achieve.”

si wafer

The State University of New York ranked 38th in the “Top 100 Worldwide Universities Granted U.S. Utility Patents for 2016,” according to the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO), which publishes the ranking annually based on U.S. Patent and Trademark Office data.

SUNY campuses were awarded 57 U.S. utility patents for advances in biotechnology, cancer research, manufacturing, renewable energy, and much more.

“Across SUNY, our faculty and students partner to make groundbreaking discoveries in a broad spectrum of areas,” said SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher. “Through more than 1,300 U.S. patents earned to date, SUNY research has led to hundreds of new technologies and advances that address society’s greatest challenges and have a positive impact on quality of life in New York and beyond. Congratulations to all those at SUNY whose important work has elevated us to this prominent world ranking.”

“This recognition marks a terrific accomplishment for our growing number of SUNY research faculty, who work tirelessly to mentor students while engaging them in research opportunities that advance the frontiers of knowledge and address state and global challenges,” said SUNY Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, and NAI Fellow, Alexander N. Cartwright. “Our faculty, a number of whom are NAI members, are a tremendous source of pride for SUNY.”

“From energy, to medicine, to consumer technologies and more, innovation is at an all-time high throughout New York State, and SUNY is at the center of it,” said SUNY Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development Grace Wang. “With a multitude of influential research institutions, supported by the largest, most comprehensive university-connected research foundation in the country, SUNY is driving positive change across the globe.”

Research at SUNY produces more than 100 new technologies every year. SUNY inventors have contributed to some of the most transformative technologies in history, including the heart-lung machine, bar code scanner, MRI, and several FDA-approved therapeutics. Some recent SUNY innovations include:

University at Albany is helping law enforcement fight crime by using scattered light to perform microscopic analysis of biological and chemical samples, an approach that allows investigators to immediately confirm the source of biological stains found at crime scenes.

Binghamton University may one day cut air conditioning costs dramatically by creating light-filtering dyes that, when applied to glass, block heat while letting light pass through.

University at Buffalo is testing a reengineered hormonal treatment for diabetes and obesity. Telemedicine will be used to link children and their families to treatment they would otherwise only have access to in a local office or school.

SUNY Downstate Medical Center is working toward a lower-power, more stable alternative to implantable cardioverter defibrillators to re-start the heart. The technology re-purposes a nerve stimulator to use the body’s own nervous system to control the heart.

SUNY-ESF researchers have developed a “Trojan Horse” to attack cancer cells using special polymers that trick cancer cells into directly ingesting chemotherapeutic drugs so they are destroyed from the inside out, thus reducing damage to normal cells.

Upstate Medical University is advancing concussion assessment through a new set of cognitive tests that will help doctors and clinicians properly diagnose and manage concussions.

SUNY College at Optometry researchers have suggested that targeting a cell’s communication channels or gap junction could slow the progress of glaucoma.

SUNY Polytechnic Institute researchers invented a nanoscale scaffold that mimics the human eye which can help test possible glaucoma drugs and other therapeutics.

Stony Brook University redesigned a catheter that incorporates LED lights to reduce the likelihood of infection after the device is inserted into a patient’s body.

Dow Corning today introduced Dow Corning CL-1000 Optical Silicone Binder, a new, more thermally stable, high refractive index (RI) material available only in China that is formulated to expand design options for high-power chip-scale LED packaging (CSP). The latest addition to the company’s portfolio of advanced solutions for LED lighting, CL-1000 Binder offers best-in-class thermal stability and is optimized for compression molding processes.

“The growing adoption of chip-scale packaging is enabling lighting designs that pack increasing numbers of LED dies more densely together in smaller form factors,” said Takuhiro Tsuchiya, global marketing manager at Dow Corning. “CL-1000 Optical Silicone Binder is Dow Corning’s response to the rapidly rising temperatures within these emerging applications. A more thermally stable iteration of our high-RI optical materials, this new product is formulated specifically to help enhance the robustness of high-power CSP designs.”

Validated through Dow Corning’s testing, the thermal stability of CL-1000 Optical Silicone Binder enabled it to exhibit lower degradation and improved maintenance of mechanical properties vs. other high-RI silicone encapsulants after 2,000 hours exposure to temperatures above 180°C. The new high-RI material also delivers excellent photo-stability with high clarity to further support reliable performance over the life of LED devices.

New CL-1000 Binder demonstrates good conformance with highly reflective Dow Corning WR-3001 and WR-3100 Die Edge Coat materials, enabling CSP packaging with enhanced reliability over longer periods. The product’s high Shore D60 hardness also enables LED packaging to withstand dicing operations.

CL-1000 Optical Silicone Binder leverages the same phenyl silicone chemistry as Dow Corning’s other industry-leading high RI optical encapsulants, which can help optimize the efficiency of next-generation LED lighting designs without costly investments in more powerful LED dies.

A market leader in materials, expertise and collaborative innovation for LED lighting concepts, Dow Corning offers solutions that span the entire LED value chain, adding reliability and efficiency for sealing, protecting, adhering, cooling and shaping light across all lighting applications.

As electronics become increasingly pervasive in our lives – from smart phones to wearable sensors – so too does the ever rising amount of electronic waste they create. A United Nations Environment Program report found that almost 50 million tons of electronic waste were thrown out in 2017–more than 20 percent higher than waste in 2015.

Troubled by this mounting waste, Stanford engineer Zhenan Bao and her team are rethinking electronics. “In my group, we have been trying to mimic the function of human skin to think about how to develop future electronic devices,” Bao said. She described how skin is stretchable, self-healable and also biodegradable – an attractive list of characteristics for electronics. “We have achieved the first two [flexible and self-healing], so the biodegradability was something we wanted to tackle.”

The team created a flexible electronic device that can easily degrade just by adding a weak acid like vinegar. The results were published May 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A newly developed flexible, biodegradable semiconductor developed by Stanford engineers shown on a human hair. Credit: Bao Lab

A newly developed flexible, biodegradable semiconductor developed by Stanford engineers shown on a human hair. Credit: Bao Lab

“This is the first example of a semiconductive polymer that can decompose,” said lead author Ting Lei, a postdoctoral fellow working with Bao.

In addition to the polymer – essentially a flexible, conductive plastic – the team developed a degradable electronic circuit and a new biodegradable substrate material for mounting the electrical components. This substrate supports the electrical components, flexing and molding to rough and smooth surfaces alike. When the electronic device is no longer needed, the whole thing can biodegrade into nontoxic components.

Biodegradable bits

Bao, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering, had previously created a stretchable electrode modeled on human skin. That material could bend and twist in a way that could allow it to interface with the skin or brain, but it couldn’t degrade. That limited its application for implantable devices and – important to Bao – contributed to waste.

Bao said that creating a robust material that is both a good electrical conductor and biodegradable was a challenge, considering traditional polymer chemistry. “We have been trying to think how we can achieve both great electronic property but also have the biodegradability,” Bao said.

Eventually, the team found that by tweaking the chemical structure of the flexible material it would break apart under mild stressors. “We came up with an idea of making these molecules using a special type of chemical linkage that can retain the ability for the electron to smoothly transport along the molecule,” Bao said. “But also this chemical bond is sensitive to weak acid – even weaker than pure vinegar.” The result was a material that could carry an electronic signal but break down without requiring extreme measures.

In addition to the biodegradable polymer, the team developed a new type of electrical component and a substrate material that attaches to the entire electronic component. Electronic components are usually made of gold. But for this device, the researchers crafted components from iron. Bao noted that iron is a very environmentally friendly product and is nontoxic to humans.

The researchers created the substrate, which carries the electronic circuit and the polymer, from cellulose. Cellulose is the same substance that makes up paper. But unlike paper, the team altered cellulose fibers so the “paper” is transparent and flexible, while still breaking down easily. The thin film substrate allows the electronics to be worn on the skin or even implanted inside the body.

From implants to plants

The combination of a biodegradable conductive polymer and substrate makes the electronic device useful in a plethora of settings – from wearable electronics to large-scale environmental surveys with sensor dusts.

“We envision these soft patches that are very thin and conformable to the skin that can measure blood pressure, glucose value, sweat content,” Bao said. A person could wear a specifically designed patch for a day or week, then download the data. According to Bao, this short-term use of disposable electronics seems a perfect fit for a degradable, flexible design.

And it’s not just for skin surveys: the biodegradable substrate, polymers and iron electrodes make the entire component compatible with insertion into the human body. The polymer breaks down to product concentrations much lower than the published acceptable levels found in drinking water. Although the polymer was found to be biocompatible, Bao said that more studies would need to be done before implants are a regular occurrence.

Biodegradable electronics have the potential to go far beyond collecting heart disease and glucose data. These components could be used in places where surveys cover large areas in remote locations. Lei described a research scenario where biodegradable electronics are dropped by airplane over a forest to survey the landscape. “It’s a very large area and very hard for people to spread the sensors,” he said. “Also, if you spread the sensors, it’s very hard to gather them back. You don’t want to contaminate the environment so we need something that can be decomposed.” Instead of plastic littering the forest floor, the sensors would biodegrade away.

As the number of electronics increase, biodegradability will become more important. Lei is excited by their advancements and wants to keep improving performance of biodegradable electronics. “We currently have computers and cell phones and we generate millions and billions of cell phones, and it’s hard to decompose,” he said. “We hope we can develop some materials that can be decomposed so there is less waste.”

A team of Columbia Engineering researchers, led by Applied Physics Assistant Professor Nanfang Yu, has invented a method to control light propagating in confined pathways, or waveguides, with high efficiency by using nano-antennas. To demonstrate this technique, they built photonic integrated devices that not only had record-small footprints but were also able to maintain optimal performance over an unprecedented broad wavelength range.

Artistic illustration of a photonic integrated device that in one arm an incident fundamental waveguide mode (with one lobe in the waveguide cross-section) is converted into the second-order mode (with two lobes in the waveguide cross-section), and in the other arm the incident fundamental waveguide mode is converted into strong surface waves, which could be used for on-chip chemical and biological sensing. Credit: Nanfang Yu/Columbia Engineering

Artistic illustration of a photonic integrated device that in one arm an incident fundamental waveguide mode (with one lobe in the waveguide cross-section) is converted into the second-order mode (with two lobes in the waveguide cross-section), and in the other arm the incident fundamental waveguide mode is converted into strong surface waves, which could be used for on-chip chemical and biological sensing. Credit: Nanfang Yu/Columbia Engineering

Photonic integrated circuits (ICs) are based on light propagating in optical waveguides, and controlling such light propagation is a central issue in building these chips, which use light instead of electrons to transport data. Yu’s method could lead to faster, more powerful, and more efficient optical chips, which in turn could transform optical communications and optical signal processing. The study is published online in Nature Nanotechnology April 17.

“We have built integrated nanophotonic devices with the smallest footprint and largest operating bandwidth ever,” Yu says. “The degree to which we can now reduce the size of photonic integrated devices with the help of nano-antennas is similar to what happened in the 1950s when large vacuum tubes were replaced by much smaller semiconductor transistors. This work provides a revolutionary solution to a fundamental scientific problem: How to control light propagating in waveguides in the most efficient way?”

The optical power of light waves propagating along waveguides is confined within the core of the waveguide: researchers can only access the guided waves via the small evanescent “tails” that exist near the waveguide surface. These elusive guided waves are particularly hard to manipulate and so photonic integrated devices are often large in size, taking up space and thus limiting the device integration density of a chip. Shrinking photonic integrated devices represents a primary challenge researchers aim to overcome, mirroring the historical progression of electronics that follows Moore’s law, that the number of transistors in electronic ICs doubles approximately every two years.

Yu’s team found that the most efficient way to control light in waveguides is to “decorate” the waveguides with optical nano-antennas: these miniature antennas pull light from inside the waveguide core, modify the light’s properties, and release light back into the waveguides. The accumulative effect of a densely packed array of nano-antennas is so strong that they could achieve functions such as waveguide mode conversion within a propagation distance no more than twice the wavelength.

“This is a breakthrough considering that conventional approaches to realize waveguide mode conversion require devices with a length that is tens of hundreds of times the wavelength,” Yu says. “We’ve been able to reduce the size of the device by a factor of 10 to 100.”

Yu’s teams created waveguide mode converters that can convert a certain waveguide mode to another waveguide mode; these are key enablers of a technology called “mode-division multiplexing” (MDM). An optical waveguide can support a fundamental waveguide mode and a set of higher-order modes, the same way a guitar string can support one fundamental tone and its harmonics. MDM is a strategy to substantially augment an optical chip’s information processing power: one could use the same color of light but several different waveguide modes to transport several independent channels of information simultaneously, all through the same waveguide. “This effect is like, for example, the George Washington Bridge magically having the capability to handle a few times more traffic volume,” Yu explains. “Our waveguide mode converters could enable the creation of much more capacitive information pathways.”

He plans next to incorporate actively tunable optical materials into the photonic integrated devices to enable active control of light propagating in waveguides. Such active devices will be the basic building blocks of augmented reality (AR) glasses–goggles that first determine the eye aberrations of the wearer and then project aberration-corrected images into the eyes–that he and his Columbia Engineering colleagues, Professors Michal Lipson, Alex Gaeta, Demetri Basov, Jim Hone, and Harish Krishnaswamy are working on now. Yu is also exploring converting waves propagating in waveguides into strong surface waves, which could eventually be used for on-chip chemical and biological sensing.

LG Innotek succeeded in mass-producing ultraviolet (UV) LED module that sterilizes the inside of water purifier faucet aerators.

The company started to mass-produce the UV LED module for sterilizing water purifier faucet aerators at the end of the last month. This product is built in LG Electronics’ new direct water purifier “PuriCare Slim Updown” launched in March in the Republic of Korea.

A water purifiers faucet aerator always holds a small amount of water. This part is prone to contamination due to the growth of germs that come in with the influx of air. However, it was difficult to install a sterilizer inside a faucet aerator because its space is too narrow.

LG Innotek developed a UV LED module customized for the faucet aerator that has strong sterilizing power and is harmless.

This module directly sterilizes the water inside faucet aerator with ultraviolet rays. The product is 1.5cm in width and 3.7cm in length and can be mounted in the small space inside the water purifier.

The product kills 99.98% of germs when a faucet aerator is exposed to ultraviolet rays for 5 minutes. This result was obtained by sterilizing a faucet aerator with 278nm wavelength.

UV LED module is also harmless since it uses only ultraviolet rays for sterilization without any chemicals or heavy metals. Also, unlike a mercury UV lamp, you don’t need to worry about breaking it.

This product is convenient to use as it allows you to control ultraviolet rays quickly and accurately. As soon as its sterilization function is activated, ultraviolet rays are released at peak performance. On the contrary, a mercury UV lamp requires about 2 minutes of warming period.

LG Electronics’ direct water purifier installed with this module allows you to sterilize faucets in an instant by pressing the “Self Care” button anytime. It also performs automatic sterilization every 1 hour.

LG Innotek plans to actively expand the application of UV LEDs to various products. The company already developed a 280nm UV-C LED that has the power of 70mW for the first time in the world.

The company has already secured a product line-up with products that are optimized for different applications, including 365nm, 385nm, 395nm and 405nm UV-A LEDs for general industry and 305nm UV-B LED for biomedical field as well as 280nm UV-C LED for sterilization.

Ho-rim Jung, the vice president of LED marketing division, said, “Our UV LEDs will increase the value of the end products that are installed with them and allow us to care for the health of users in a smart way.”

According to Yole Development, a market research firm, the global market for UV LEDs is expected to grow more than seven folds from USD 130 million in 2015 to USD 1 billion in 2021. Especially, the UV LEDs for water purification is expected to occupy 60% of the said UV LED market.

Semiconductors are used for myriad optoelectronic devices. However, as devices get smaller and smaller and more demanding, new materials are needed to ensure that devices work with greater efficiency. Now, researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have pioneered a new class of semiconductor materials that might enhance the functionality of optoelectronic devices and solar panels–perhaps even using one hundred times less material than the commonly used silicon.

Researchers at USC Viterbi, led by Jayakanth Ravichandran, an assistant professor in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Sciences and including Shanyuan Niu, Huaixun Huyan, Yang Liu, Matthew Yeung, Kevin Ye, Louis Blankemeier, Thomas Orvis, Debarghya Sarkar, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Rehan Kapadia, and David J. Singh, a professor of physics from University of Missouri, have developed a new class of materials that are superior in performance and have reduced toxicity. Their process, documented in “Bandgap Control via Structural and Chemical Tuning of Transition Metal Perovskite Chalcogenide,” is published in Advanced Materials.

Ravichandran, the lead on this research, is a materials scientist, who has always been interested in understanding the flow of electrons and heat through materials, as well as the how electrons interact within materials. This deep knowledge of how material composition affects electron movement was critical to Ravichandran’s and his colleagues’ most recent innovation.

Computers and electronics have been getting better, but according to Jayakanth Ravichandran, the principal investigator of this study, “the performance of the most basic device–the transistors –are not getting better.” There is a plateau in terms of performance, as noted by what is considered the “end of Moore’s law.” Similar to electronics, there is a lot of interest to develop high performance semiconductors for opto-electronics. The collaborative team of material scientists and electrical engineers wanted to develop new materials which could showcase the ideal optical and electrical properties for a variety of applications such as displays, light detectors and emitters, as well as solar cells.

The researchers developed a class of semiconductors called “transition metal perovskite chalcogenides.” Currently, the most useful semiconductors don’t hold enough carriers for a given volume of material (a property which is referred to as “density of states”) but they transport electrons fast and thus are known to have high mobility. The real challenge for scientists has been to increase this density of states in materials, while maintaining high mobility. The proposed material is predicted to possess these conflicting properties.

As a first step to show its potential applications, the researchers studied its ability absorb and emit light. “There is a saying,” says Ravichandran of the dialogue among those in the optics and photonics fields, “that a very good LED is also a very good solar cell.” Since the materials Ravichandran and his colleagues developed absorb and emit light effectively, solar cells are a possible application.

Solar cells absorb light and convert it into electricity. However, solar panels are made of silicon, which comes from sand via a highly energy intensive extraction process. If solar cells could be made of a new, alternative semiconductor material such as the one created by the USC Viterbi researchers– a material that could fit more electrons for a given volume (and reducing the thickness of the panels), solar cells could be more efficient–perhaps using one hundred times less material to generate the same amount of energy. This new material, if applied in the solar energy industry, could make solar energy less expensive.

While it is a long road to bring such a class of materials to market, the next step is to recreate this material in an ultra-thin film form to make solar cells and test their performance. “The key contribution of this work,” says Ravichandran, “is our new synthesis method, which is a drastic improvement from earlier studies. Also, our demonstration of wide tunability in optical properties (especially band gap) is promising for developing new optoelectronic devices with tunable optical properties.”

Graphene Flagship researchers from AMBER at Trinity College Dublin have fabricated printed transistors consisting entirely of layered materials. Published today in the leading journal Science, the team’s findings have the potential to cheaply print a range of electronic devices from solar cells to LEDs with applications from interactive smart food and drug labels to next-generation banknote security and e-passports.

Led by Professor Jonathan Coleman from AMBER (the Science Foundation Ireland-funded materials science research centre hosted in Trinity College Dublin), in collaboration with the groups of Professor Georg Duesberg (AMBER) and Professor Laurens Siebbeles (TU Delft, Netherlands), the team used standard printing techniques to combine graphene flakes as the electrodes with other layered materials, tungsten diselenide and boron nitride as the channel and separator (two important parts of a transistor) to form an all-printed, all-layered materials, working transistor.

All of these are flakes are a few nanometres thick but hundreds of nanometres wide. Critically, it is the ability of flakes made from different layered materials to have electronic properties that can be conducting (in the case of graphene), insulating (boron nitride) or semiconducting (tungsten diselenide) that enable them to create the building blocks of electronics. While the performance of these printed layered devices cannot yet compare with advanced transistors, the team believe there is a wide scope to improve the performance of their printed TFTs beyond the current state-of-the-art.

Professor Coleman, who is an investigator in AMBER and Trinity’s School of Physics, said, “In the future, printed devices will be incorporated into even the most mundane objects such as labels, posters and packaging. Printed electronic circuitry will allow consumer products to gather, process, display and transmit information: for example, milk cartons will send messages to your phone warning that the milk is about to go out-of-date. We believe that layered materials can compete with the materials currently used for printed electronics.”

All of the layered materials were printed from inks created using the liquid exfoliation method previously developed by Professor Coleman and already licensed. Using liquid processing techniques to create the layered materials inks is especially advantageous in that it yields large quantities of high quality layered materials which helps to enable the potential to print circuitry at low cost.

Cree, Inc. (Nasdaq: CREE) announces the new XLamp XP-G3 Royal Blue LED, the industry’s highest performing Royal Blue LED. The new XP-G3 LED doubles the maximum light output of similar size competing LEDs and delivers breakthrough wall-plug efficiency of up to 81 percent. This superior performing Royal Blue LED expands Cree’s leading high power portfolio, enabling lighting manufacturers to deliver differentiated LED solutions for applications such as horticulture, architectural and entertainment lighting.

royal blue led

Using the new XP-G3 Royal Blue LED and the recently introduced XP-E High Efficiency Photo Red LED, Cree has created a new horticulture reference design that achieves a Photosynthetic Photon Flux (PPF) efficiency of up to 3.2 μmol/J at steady-state, which is over 50 percent more efficient than the traditional high pressure sodium solutions in use today. The XP-G3 Royal Blue LED delivers up to 3402 mW radiant flux, which corresponds to 13 μmol/s PPF, at its 2A maximum current and 85 C junction temperature.

“Our newest horticulture-optimized products help lighting manufacturers push LED horticulture systems into mainstream use,” said Dave Emerson, Cree LEDs senior vice president and general manager. “Cree’s high power LED technology provides the best combination of photon output, efficiency and reliability to drive the replacement of outdated high pressure sodium lights with LED lighting solutions that minimize power consumption and maximize crop yield.”

The XP-G3 Royal Blue LED is built on Cree’s ceramic high-power technology, which can deliver excellent lifetimes even at the extreme temperature of 105 C. Additionally, horticulture lighting manufacturers can immediately take advantage of the existing ecosystem of drivers and optics proven to work with Cree’s other 3.45 mm footprint XP products to shorten their time to market.

ams, a worldwide supplier of high performance sensor solutions, today announced the AS7225 tunable-white lighting smart system sensor, further broadening the solution set for sensor-integrated tunable-white lighting solutions. With the addition of the AS7225, OEM lighting manufacturers can access ams’ closed-loop CCT tuning and daylight compensation, while retaining the existing host microprocessor architecture in their smart lighting design. The result is higher precision, more flexible LED binning, and lower system costs for tunable white lighting systems.

The AS7225 is equipped with the product family’s industry-first embedded tri-stimulus CIE XYZ color sensor to enable precise color sensing with direct mapping to the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) 1931 color space which is recognized as the standard coordinate definition for human color perception. CCT and daylighting tuning directives are communicated to the host microprocessor via an industry-standard I2C interface, allowing IoT smart lighting manufacturers to avoid costly calibration and tuning algorithm development and reduce time to deployment.

“As the lighting industry moves to tunable solutions, the inclusion of closed loop sensor-driven integration not only increases white or daylighting tuning precision, it also loosens the required precision for both LED binning and system components. This results in cost reductions for both the overall bill of materials, as well as in time and cost savings in the materials management and manufacturing processes”, commented Tom Griffiths, Senior Marketing Manager at ams.

The AS7225 is an extension of ams’ Cognitive Lighting smart lighting manager family. The efficient AS7225 is available in a 4.5 x 4.7mm LGA package, for flexible integration into luminaires, light-engines and larger replacement lamps, such as LED linear T-LED products. The device provides precise CCT tuning direction between configured warm and cool white LED strings within a luminaire. In addition to the CCT- tuning functions, the AS7225 can additionally be used looking outward in luminaire designs to provide precise daylight management, or can deliver combined CCT-tuning and daylighting directives by the addition of ams’ TSL4531 ambient light sensor.

“Recent trends in LED device pricing show that chips have moved away from being the primary cost element in a typical commercial luminaire. This means that in just a few years, tunable lighting will become the standard for new commercial lighting installations”, Griffiths added. “The comfort, productivity and health benefits of good lighting have been clear for decades, and as it is becoming cost effective to do so, tunable lighting will be a key element in delivering those benefits from LED smart lighting platforms.”

Pricing for the AS7225 spectral tuning IoT smart lighting manager is set at $2.40 in quantities of 5,000 pieces, and is available in production volumes now.