Summary.
Next time you’re stopped at a red light, take a look at the light itself. More than 50% of red traffic lights in the United States now use solid-state lighting, a semiconductor-based technology that is quietly transforming the $79 billion world lighting market. More than 80% of all European cars sold this year will use semiconducting materials called light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate the dashboard panel. Close to $3 billion worth of high-brightness LEDs are sold annually for applications like backlighting in cell phones, and most of the automotive brake lights in the States are long-lasting LEDs. “Solid-state lighting is the first truly new lighting technology to emerge in almost 100 years,” says Nadarajah Narendran, the director of research at Rensselaer Polytechnic’s Lighting Research Center in Troy, New York.