Standards and regulations

Back in the commercial world, a lack of standards is presenting another obstacle to the widespread adoption of LED technology.

For Douglas Bryan, CEO of Lighting Council Australia, the many LED products flooding a lightly-regulated market is a cause for concern.

"There are some very good products available, but there are lots of products that fail to meet the claims of suppliers in terms of longevity and other aspects of performance like colour characteristics and efficacy," Bryan told Electronics News. "Quality issues on the market are undermining consumer confidence in the product to justify the major outlay for LEDs."

As the first step toward improving consumer confidence in LED lights, Lighting Council Australia introduced a labelling-based quality program called the Solid State Lighting (SSL) quality scheme.

A voluntary industry scheme, it relies on third-party test reports of the products provided by the supplier for critical parameters like luminaire efficacy, light output, measured input power, correlated colour temperature and the colour rendering index.

Once verified and paid for, a label is issued for use on the product and in product literature for a period of three years.

The scheme, being entirely voluntary, is far from being a standard or regulation, and presents little, if any obstacle to rogue importers. According to Bryan, Australian regulators are awaiting the introduction of international standards and the outcome of more testing around the world.

As with other products, the US, Europe and Asia are expected to have different standards and regulations. Currently, the most advanced is the U.S. Department of Energy's Solid State Lighting Energy Star standard.

The U.S. standard is based around the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES) LM-79 "Electrical and Photometric Measurements of Solid-State Lighting Products" and LM-80 "Measuring Lumen Maintenance of LED Light Sources" test methods.

Together, these two methods cover the luminaire and the LED package, arrays and modules, and LM-80 in particular is rigorous enough to eliminate most of the unsubstantiated claims made about LED lifetime.

It is hard to imagine what Thomas Edison and the other scientists behind the incandescent light bulb would have thought of today's world, as their invention is superceded by ever more efficient technologies in quick succession.

But perhaps Edison, that consummate capitalist, would recognise the immense potential surrounding LEDs – the opportunity for brighter and near-ubiquitous lighting, without the heavy environmental cost; the opportunity for Australia to play a bigger part in the global electronics supply chain, and for quality electronics designers to make big profits from their expertise and hard work.

However, even as consumers and manufacturers around the world start to take notice of LEDs, there are threats to the widespread adoption of the technology. Already, many early adopters, stung by the flood of inferior products, perceive LEDs as being overpriced and of variable quality.