The NSERC Emerging Lighting Solutions Network (ELSN), led by a team of researchers at McGill, five other Canadian Universities, and one college, and in partnership with over twenty companies and government labs in Canada, is dedicated to the development of phosphor-free solid-state lighting technology.
The team has developed a dramatically different approach for manufacturing solid-state lamps, wherein white-light emission is achieved from semiconducting nanowires grown on low-cost, large-area silicon substrates. By bringing together key scientists and engineers from universities and the lighting industry, the ELSN will address the grand challenges in manufacturing such nanowire-based, phosphor-free solid-state lamps - including technology computer aided design, epitaxial growth, characterization, device fabrication, testing, and applications. The ELSN aims to design, manufacture, and test phosphor-free solid-state lamps with an efficiency of over 200 lumens/watt, effectively doubling the efficiency of the ~100 lumens/watt phosphor-based devices currently on the market and to successfully transfer the manufacturing process to its industrial partners in Canada.