Shining the Spotlight: In-depth LED Product Reviews and Tests

The development of Chip Scale Packaged (Flip Chip or CSP) LEDs is a lighting innovation with several advantages: no substrate, solderless cabling, small size and high optical density.

CSP, or Chip Scale Package LEDs, are 80% smaller than standard LEDs and have all components integrated.  This feature does not require soldered wire connections and reduces thermal resistance, the heat transfer path, and potential sources of damage.

Most of the products and services we use or consume have a unit of measurement. The kilograms of a bag of apples, litters of a bottle of water, meters of a roll of cable, hours of work are some common examples. Modern technology has introduced us to new units: gigahertz of processing power, kilowatts of energy consumption, gigabytes of storage or memory. All have one important thing in common: interested people have easy access to devices of measurement, crucial for quality control or fairness of a transaction.

Featuring the Direct Mountable Chip technology the new E17A and E21A LED series from Nichia are direct mountable, packageless, chip scale LEDs which reduce total system cost and increase performance at the same time.

The Direct Mountable Chip technology slashes at one major element of system cost: heat management. With thermal resistance of only 0.3 (℃/W junction to Ts measuring point), heat sinks can be smaller or higher performance can be obtained without increasing the heat sink. 

Compared with 1-3 Watt LEDs from other manufactures the NVSWE21A (304lm@5000K and 2.1W) and the NCSWE17A  (152lm@5000K and 1.05W) are considerably more effective at transferring the heat away from the LED chip.

As a manufacturer, we want to use the most powerful LEDs in our LED strips and modules. We focus especially on mid-power LEDs that typically consume less than 0.3 watts of power, are fairly small, and require minimal or no cooling. A large part of our products use these LEDs.

Before selecting the most powerful LED for our products, we compared more than a dozen models from leading LED manufacturers: Nichia, Osram Opto Semiconductors, Samsung, Philips Lumileds, LG Innotek, Seoul Semiconductor, Cree, Everlight.

For a meaningful comparison, we have selected LEDs that operate at 65 mA with a voltage between 2.75 and 3.2 V, divided into three groups:

Cold white (5000-6500K), CRI 80+, for linear fluorescent lamp replacement (LED tubes) or luminaires for office or industry.
Warm white (2700K-3900K), CRI 80+, is normally used in LED lamps, linear luminaires, cove lamps, desk lamps, normally for residential and catering applications.
Warm white (2700K-3900K), CRI 90+, with applications in luxury lighting, professional linear luminaires, cove luminaires for the commercial and gastronomic sector.
For each category, we compare luminous flux and luminous efficacy at the usual "laboratory temperature" barrier of 25ºC and more realistic 100ºC. The comparative data are those from the manufacturer's data sheet.

Our Nichia Maxline LED modules are perfectly suited for  linear lamps or fixtures with superior performance.

Integrated into a linear LED fixture, the Nichia Maxline modules can easily surpass the performance targets for effective and economical sound replacement of fluorescent tubes. This outstanding results arise from the use of Nichia 757 Mid-Power LEDs with the highest performance on the market.

Our Nichia Performer Flexible LED Strip is designed for projects involving cove, case or shelf lighting and architectural back-lighting. It uses Mid-Power LEDs with the highest performance on the market as of today, the Nichia 757G series.