White Light LEDs or White LED Lamps:
Shuji Nakamura, a Japanese – born American electronic engineer invented the blue LED. He was awarded the Nobel prize for physics for 2014. He was also awarded the global energy prize in the year 2015. His invention of blue LED made the fabrication of white LED possible.
LED lamps, bulbs, street lighting are becoming very popular these days because of the very high efficiency of LEDs in terms of light output per unit input power(in milliWatts), as compared to the incandescent bulbs. So for general purpose lightings, white light is preferred.
Commercially available white LEDs are normally manufactured by using the technique of wavelength conversion. It is a process which partly or completely converts the radiation of a LED into white light. There are many ways of wavelength conversion. One of these methods uses blue LED and yellow phosphor. In this method of wavelength conversion, a LED which emits blue colour is used to excite a yellow colour phosphor. This results in the emission of yellow and blue light and this mixture of blue and yellow light gives the appearance of white light. This method is the least expensive method for producing white light.