This post was written by Keith Dawson for UBM Tech’s community Web site All LED Lighting, sponsored by Philips Lumileds. It is archived here because the All LED Lighting site has gone dark. This material is Copyright 2013-2015 by UBM Americas.

2014-08-04

Monday Roundup: Smart Explosion

This week: Smart cities will quadruple, hotel guests dislike the lighting, and an LED driver design resource.

Ask an expert about LED driver design
ON Semiconductor has an online resource that those designing LED drivers will want to explore. They have a couple of dozen whitepapers, application notes, and design notes on driver design, and a handful of videos. ON Semi says new material will be posted at regular intervals.

Perhaps most interesting is the Ask an Expert feature with a searchable knowledge base. If you just can't find your answer, you can use a form to ask directly. ON Semi promises that an expert will answer online in two business days.

An OLED coalition
Companies across the development chain for OLEDs are banding together in an initiative spurred by the Taiwanese research institute ITRI. The OLED Lighting Commer­cial­i­za­tion Alliance (OLCA) has the aim of bolstering Taiwan's place in the OLED universe.

The alliance has organized five committees -- lamps, lighting design, materials, fixtures, and optical engines -- with an eye toward moving OLEDs closer to suitability for indoor lighting.

OLED-Info.com reports that more than 60 companies have shown an interest in collaborating with OLCA members. The initial membership includes Corning, Merck, RiT Display Corp., the TLFEA (Taiwan Lighting Fixture Export Association), Tongtai Machine & Tool, and WiseChip.

Smart cities to quadruple
IHS is making fairly exact predictions about how the number of smart cities worldwide will grow over the coming years. By their definition, smart cities are those which have deployed or are piloting the integration of information, communications, and technology solutions across three or more different functional areas of a city. These areas include mobile and transport, energy and sustainability, physical infrastructure, governance, and safety and security.

By that measure IHS figures there are 21 smart cities now, and they project 88 of them by 2025. By that time 32 of them will be Asia-Pacific, 31 in EMEA, and 25 in the Americas.

In many of the emerging smart cities, the implementation of LED street lighting will be an early milestone on their way to more encompassing levels of integration.

Hotel guests knock lighting
Osram did some research to elucidate the importance of hotel lighting. They found more than 350,000 online reviews of hotel stays worldwide in which lighting was mentioned. (They don't say how large the full sample was -- that is, what percentage of all reviews bring up lighting.) For London hotels alone, 10,000 reviews called it out. Out of the 350,000, more than half were critical of hotel lighting.

Mostly people were not pleased about about dim, bad, or sparse lighting in their rooms. Visitors to a Copenhagen hotel compared its lighting to that of a railway station waiting room. Others griped that they found it impossible to work in their room because of poor lighting. Inadequate or nonexistent reading lights? Check.

Osram has some suggestions for hoteliers, but the central one is: Pay attention to lighting and don't treat it as an afterthought. It's important.

— Keith Dawson Circle me on Google+ Follow me on Twitter Visit my LinkedIn page, Editor-in-Chief, All LED Lighting