My name is Shuji Nakamura. I'm a professor at UCSB and I'm famous as the inventor of a blue LED and also inventor of a blue laser diode.

My name is George Craford. I was involved in the development of the first yellow LEDs, in addition to a much brighter red LED.

My name is John Edmond, and I'm one of the co-founders of Cree, which we started in 1987 to work on LEDs. And of course, LEDs have grown from just a small emitter into now lighting the world.

I'm B.J. Lee, the chairman of Epistar, the biggest chip supplier in Taiwan.

My name's John Davidson. I work with Walmart. And I'm basically the specifier for all the LED systems in the stores.

John Edmond: The cool factor is that you can take LEDs and use it for any lighting application. Whether it's a bulb for your home, it's a spotlight, when it's lighting a football stadium.

John Davidson: Some of the successful projects that we've seen are our South Euclid store in Ohio, where we're able to retrofit a store completely, from site parking to indoors, 100%, with LED. We were able to realize a 34% reduction in energy use for that particular store.

B.J. Lee: The first time, when I think about that LED can go to the big panel, a large area display TV, that's the first time I realized solid-state lighting can replace everything.

George Craford: In terms of LED performance, we're kind of moving into an evolutionary phase, I think, rather than a revolutionary phase. Probably the biggest impact area is in the phosphor area, so we aren't wasting so much light in the nonvisible part of the spectrum.

John Edmond: We have to keep working on the epitaxy, the basic crystal structure of the LED. So we have to keep working on improving that, improving the thermal capability of the LEDs. Because LEDs do not like high temperature.

George Craford: If we take a given package and drive it at a higher and higher current density to get more and more lumens out of that package, that will cause the efficiency to go down because of droop. If we solve that problem, that would at least eliminate that type of a conflict.

Shuji Nakamura: I think laser lighting is coming in the long term. Using a laser diode, you can make a very, very bright lighting source because you can increase the current density almost 1000 times compared with LEDs.

John Davidson: It's an exciting time, because we're looking at a new technology. We're able to garner more information from this technology.

B.J. Lee: The next, I think, is connected lighting. Part of the Internet of Things connecting with some other equipment or appliance, making the light be a vehicle transmitting information or sensing some of the data or even security that you need.

Shuji Nakamura: The government can support for long-term research. Because industry is always interested in the short-term research because industry has to make a product as soon as possible. So government support is very, very important for industry.

John Edmond: SSL worked very closely with a lot of companies-- in particular, in my case, it was with Cree. And they looked at the same issues that we were looking at to get LEDs to the next level.

B.J. Lee: DOE, they published data on the Multi-Year Program Plan. So that everybody can learn from there, to give you sort of a direction.

John Edmond: Whether it was lumens per watt, whether it was incorporating a driver, whether it was coming out with a particular luminaire that did a particular thing. They worked closely with folks like Cree to put the money where it mattered.

George Craford: I think government funding in general, working on things like reliability and characterizing different kinds of devices is very helpful. The reports that they put out, it’s a very helpful thing to the industry.