Nearly Time to Get the LED Out

The future of LEDs is looking brighter and brighter.

Light-emitting diodes have been around since the early '60s, and General Electric was the first to develop them as a source of light.

But they have long been seen as inferior to standard light bulbs and are used mostly in places where bulbs aren't practical, such as calculator screens, model railroad cars, message displays in airports and, increasingly, illuminated screens on iPods and mobile phones.

The backlighting in mobile devices proved a sort of tipping point for LEDs, spurring enough demand to allow dozens of companies to invest in developing the technology into maturity.

That research has helped transform LEDs from a niche-lighting technology to a form of lighting that threatens to displace light bulbs sometime in the coming decade -- the way digital cameras did to celluloid film.

But the mobile-devices market has pretty much run its course as a growth driver for LEDs. Strategies Unlimited, a Mountain View, Calif.,-based research firm, said this week that growth in the LED industry, which averaged 40% a year between 2001 and 2004, grew only 6% to $3.9 billion in 2005 -- a dramatic slowdown for an emerging industry.

Strategies Unlimited said the slowdown was caused by the downturn in the global mobile-device market, which made up 52% of the total LED market last year. But the firm expects growth to pick back up as new LED applications gather steam: automobile headlamps, TV and PC monitors and lights in homes, streets and buildings.

LEDs offer several advantages over light bulbs: They're durable, they can last 10 years, and when they do die, they fade out slowly rather than leaving you in the dark. They also light up quicker and give off much less heat than light bulbs.