SLD Laser of Goleta, CA, USA (a spin-off from LED lighting firm Soraa Inc that is commercializing visible laser light sources for automotive, specialty lighting and display applications) says that its LaserLight SMD product line has achieved UL certification for the solid-state lighting safety standard ANSI/UL 8750.
The LaserLight products won top honors at May’s LightFair exhibition in Chicago in the category ‘LED/OLED, Chips & Modules’. They also recently received Gold Innovators Award from Laser Focus World, announced at the CLEO conference in San Jose, CA.
LaserLight is said to deliver the benefits of solid-state illumination such as minimal power consumption and long lifetime, with the highly directional output that has been possible only with legacy technology. LaserLight SMD delivers 500 lumens of white light and 1000 candela per square mm output from a 7mm surface-mount device (SMD) lighting package. The sources utilize the firm’s proprietary and patented semi-polar gallium nitride (GaN) laser diodes combined with phosphor chip technology and novel high-luminance packaging.
“SLD has achieved the world’s first UL certification of a laser based lighting source,” says SLD Laser co-founder & president Dr James Raring. “We are driven by the vision that laser diodes are lighting’s future - we are thrilled to see regulatory acceptance and adoption of our LaserLight products in so many of our customer’s lighting applications,” he adds.
“These products were evaluated per the applicable requirements of UL 8750 - the standard for LED equipment for LED lighting,” notes Bahram Barzideh, principal engineer at UL. “Additionally, based on request from SLD Laser, UL performed testing per IEC TR 62778:2014 to assess risk group (RG) levels for blue light hazard,” he adds. “With the results of these two evaluations, SLD Laser can now identify specific construction and performance characteristics for the LaserLight product line which will allow OEMs to more easily integrate these components into lighting products and systems, help reduce the need for end-product testing and accelerate time to market.”
SLD’s LaserLight SMD is claimed to be the first laser-based commercial lighting product, delivering more than 10 times higher luminance than LEDs, and enabling safe, highly collimated, white light output with superior optical control and light delivery from miniature optics or high-efficiency fiber optics. LaserLight is being adopted now in portable, architectural, outdoor and entertainment applications to produce lighting effects such as ultra-compact long-range spotlights, glare-free pattern illumination with sharp light gradients, and fiber-optic remote lighting effects. For future applications, LaserLight technology is being designed into next-generation lighting systems involving dynamic beam shaping, enhanced visibility imaging and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) for emerging smart car and smart city applications, and LiFi high-speed data communication for 5G and beyond.
