Alternative Interconnect Manufacturing

Nationally, lighting now consumes over 20% of all electricity generated, and energy demand continues to grow. But solid‐state lighting (SSL)—due to its efficiency, reasonable cost of ownership, controllability, and lifetime—has the potential to become the dominant lighting technology, accounting for the majority of the lighting market within the next 20 years. This requires very rapid growth of SSL production capabilities. Optics and packaging are a significant portion of LED and OLED costs, and of the overall luminaire costs. These costs contribute to slowing the SSL market‐penetration rate. An inkjet print (IJP)‐additive manufacturing method of fabricating three‐dimensional (3D) freeform gradient index (GRIN) optics is proposed. The benefit of the technology is that new primary and secondary LED optics can be designed and then fabricated, within minutes, without the weeks‐long wait required for custom injection‐mold tooling or the wait for diamond turning. The process is compatible with low‐temperature web processing, using commercial inkjet print heads, at a cost less than current optics technologies. The performance benefits of the technology include the ability to more efficiently extract light from LED packages, to readily achieve the wide range of spectral power distributions required of applications, and to perform chromatic compensation. A series of 3D freeform GRIN optics, optimized for primary and secondary LED optics, will be designed, manufactured, and calibrated. A series of optics will then be integrated directly with a single element and arrays of LEDs, with the performance of the technology compared to conventional approaches. The optics will be reliability and environmentally tested, and commercial‐scale cost models will be developed. Then, candidate components will be assembled into SSL products that will be made available to stakeholders for evaluation. The Phase I program will include reliability and environmental testing of parts. A method of more‐efficient fabrication of optics for LED lighting is proposed. It will be shown that inkjet‐print fabrication of nanocomposite optical inks allows for more efficient and more precise light extraction from LED lamps—and at a fraction of the cost of conventional techniques. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that switching to SSL luminaires could reduce energy costs in the United States by $250B over the next 20 years, avoiding nearly 1,800 million metric tons of carbon‐dioxide emissions during that time. Optics costs are 5% to 10% of the cost in luminaires and MSB A19 bulbs; these costs are expected to drop almost 50% over the next five years.