In a previous post, I had written about the incandescent light bulb and its gradual demise. If the incandescent light bulb is disappearing, then what product will take its place to illuminate our lives? It looks like the future of lighting is going to be the LED. Wired magazine recently had an article about the ongoing innovations in the lighting industry. The LEDs appear to be the clear winner in the battle between CFLs and LEDs. Although the current price tag of LED bulbs is way too high, it is expected to come down a lot in the next few years. There are significant technical challenges to overcome before the LED bulbs become common-place.

The thing that stood out in that article was the note about manufacturing process of LED bulbs. LEDs are after all semi-conductor diodes. They are manufactured similar to all other semi-conductors products. This means that the core of our new lighting products will be manufactured in the same process that manufactures our digital networked world. This fact ties in well with another recent announcement.

A couple of months ago, NXP semi-conductors announced their Green Chip Lighting technology. Their technology is available for CFL and LED bulbs. Note that this technology is currently an add-on to the light bulb. This means that the networking technology is added on to the lighting technology. A possible improvement to this technology would be to integrate the lighting and the networking components. The LED and networking technology are manufactured in the same process, so it might be possible to integrate both of them on the same chip. This might lead to the development of something along the lines of a ‘Networked-Light-On-a-Chip’. I am not sure what it would take to make this idea a reality but such a product would be really cool. Networked lighting technology would reduce energy consumption in two ways: the LEDs consume a lot less energy to generate the same amount of light and the networking features makes it easy to manage energy consumption in large buildings.

It has been a long journey for CFLs and LEDs to replace the incandescent light bulb. Fluorescent lighting was invented ton the 1890s and LEDs have been around since 1920s. However there is one part of our modern electric lighting that will be even harder to disrupt: the standard Edison socket. Every new lighting technology that has been invented has tried to make bulbs that fit into the Edison socket. The major problem with trying to adapt both the CFLs and LEDs to our lighting needs was in trying to make these technologies fit in to the socket. If LEDs and networked lights truly change the way we light our worlds, they would need to disrupt the Edison socket. This might be a bigger challenge than integrating lighting and networking technologies.