CVD, Blue and The Wire

Researchers in France have fabricated light emitting diodes based on GaN core/shell wires grown by metal organic chemical vapour deposition on Silicon substrates, with blue electroluminescence at 450 nm, reported for the first time. Their results presented in this issue of Electronics Letters open up a possible advance in lighting. Even after the initial LED breakthrough that occurred at the beginning of the century, with the emergence of high-brightness white LEDs - and the improvement in performance since then - the general lighting market is still not widely open to LEDs. Wire-based LEDs have the potential to greatly extend the performance limits of solid-state lighting.