Soraa 1st Product - White GaN LED Spotlight

Hmm, this lamp being based on a new GaN "Violet" LED could be something of a novelty interest, but no datasheet seems yet to be available.

SORAA Premium


Soraa launches first product, a white GaN-based LED spotlight lamp - Laser Focus World
Posted today 02/09/2012 in LaserFocusWorld.com
Quote:
Soraa . . . has announced its first product: a single-emitter white-LED spotlight designed to replace small halogen spotlights for commercial use . . . Another feature of the new lamp is the LED's spectrum. Rather than the usual blue LED and yellow phosphor, Soraa's product uses a violet LED and a wider-spectrum phosphor that more closely models the desired blackbody spectrum in the visible.

Soraa Introduces Disruptive LED 2.0 Technology
Posted Wednesday 2/8/2012 in EETimes.com
Quote:
Soraa's proprietary GaN on GaN™ technology yields the highest-performance LED MR16 lamp the market has to offer. Soraa's pure GaN crystal is up to one thousand times purer than GaN on sapphire or GaN on silicon carbide substrates, the platforms other LED lighting technologies rely upon today.

Secretive Solid-State Lighting Firm Soraa Unstealths : Greentech Media
Posted Tuesday 02/07/2012 in GreenTechMedia.com.com
Quote:
“Soraa has developed the world's highest-performance LED lighting product, which is 80 percent more energy efficient versus incandescents,” said Andrew Chung of Khosla Ventures. “[Soraa’s LED] has a payback of less than a year -- and the potential to shake up the lighting market in 2012 and beyond, as recently reported by GTM's Yoni Cohen. . . .

Note that Soraa is going after the traditional halogen MR16 lamps commonly used in commercial and home applications. According to the press release, the Soraa LED MR16 lamp is priced to achieve less than one-year payback and is meant to replace the 50-watt halogen bulb.

That's interesting, they are using violet instead of blue :thinking:

Os/GE tried it a long time ago
VIO LED solutions

I'm hopeful that Soraa can do it better. Soraa looks very promising on paper, and I thought I remembered hearing that they were having more success than most at growing non polar GaN that is much better at efficiently producing photons. Combined with a better matched GaN substrate too and a richer phosphor, this could be the warm white high CRI high efficiency LED we've all been waiting for. Or at least maybe a stepping stone towards that goal.

also, spec sheets available for the lamps here: http://www.soraa.com/resources#premium-specs

They probably won't release their emitter yet.

I've said this BEFORE, and I'll say it again, I think Soraa is going to FLOP. They seem to be great marketers, with decent product claims, but ones that never quite come to market.

Nichia, Osram, and Soraa were all talking about direct-green laser diodes around the same time. Nichia and Osram have shipping parts. Soraa doesn't.

Soraa was talking about 4W blue laser diode arrays too - where are those? Nichia has now approaching 3W from a single multi-mode emitter, and Soraa still doesn't have ANY shipping laser diodes.

They're too slow. They're joining parties too late, with products that are ho-hum.

Then they pump this LED emitter, and all of a sudden their website appears to be that of a company completely transformed into a LED bulb manufacturer? SORAA

It just smells of a company that can't follow through, and needs to sell *something* in order to mitigate losses. On CPF there's a thread about these bulbs, and the consensus is that it's basically a dud. 4x the efficiency of incandescent? We're way past that in LED bulb efficiency elsewhere already.

rhd said:

I've said this BEFORE, and I'll say it again, I think Soraa is going to FLOP. They seem to be great marketers, with decent product claims, but ones that never quite come to market.

Nichia, Osram, and Soraa were all talking about direct-green laser diodes around the same time. Nichia and Osram have shipping parts. Soraa doesn't.

Soraa was talking about 4W blue laser diode arrays too - where are those? Nichia has now approaching 3W from a single multi-mode emitter, and Soraa still doesn't have ANY shipping laser diodes.

They're too slow. They're joining parties too late, with products that are ho-hum.

Then they pump this LED emitter, and all of a sudden their website appears to be that of a company completely transformed into a LED bulb manufacturer? SORAA

It just smells of a company that can't follow through, and needs to sell *something* in order to mitigate losses. On CPF there's a thread about these bulbs, and the consensus is that it's basically a dud. 4x the efficiency of incandescent? We're way past that in LED bulb efficiency elsewhere already.

Click to expand...

Disagree on all counts. As do many others, since they just finished a round a fundraising with almost $100million in new investment.

This bulb isn't meant to compete with incandescent, it's a drop-in halogen replacement. Not even general halogen replacement, but a very specific form-factor. One of what will surely be many products to come.

Also, the 4W stuff from Soraa with still single-emitter.

But they're taking the same approach that Tesla did with electric cars: start high-end, early adopters, people willing to pay a premium for a premium product. Then trickle down to regular Joe as prices come down. Their approaches aren't economically feasible for mass-market incandescent-replacement bulbs...YET. But their approaches do have merit that can still be realized down the road.

The approaches being used by Soraa still have cost issues, so it makes sense to start out in an arena where cost is much less of a factor while working on future applications where cost is still an issue. This is one example of that philosophy.

pullbangdead said:

Disagree on all counts. As do many others, since they just finished a round a fundraising with almost $100million in new investment.

This bulb isn't meant to compete with incandescent, it's a drop-in halogen replacement. Not even general halogen replacement, but a very specific form-factor. One of what will surely be many products to come.

But they're taking the same approach that Tesla did with electric cars: start high-end, early adopters, people willing to pay a premium for a premium product. Then trickle down to regular Joe as prices come down. Their approaches aren't economically feasible for mass-market incandescent-replacement bulbs...YET. But their approaches do have merit that can still be realized down the road.

Click to expand...

Hey, you could be right. There's no right / wrong, until we actually see how this unfolds.

I'm not critical of their technology, I'm critical of them as a company, and since I don't really know how their company actually operates, I'm really just critical of the appearance their company projects. That's all.

That appearance, is of a company not *entirely* in the vaporware category, but somewhat straddling the line. Again though, we'll see. I'm registering my perspective early. Maybe two years from now we can look back at this post and laugh at my perspective, as we're all harvesting Soraa goodies from widely successful consumer electronics products - I'd like nothing more