Where the heck did all these blinding blue LEDs start coming from?
You have this man to thank for them. Back in the early 1990s, Shuji Nakamura was the top research and development guy for a small Japanese chemical outfit called Nichia (NEE’chee’ah). They made phosphors for TV tubes and fluorescent light bulbs, among other things. He was the one who figured out how to deposit certain types of chemicals onto artificial sapphire that led the way for today’s blindingly bright blue, blue-green, pure green, and white LEDs. Nichia Chemical (now Nichia America) leads the world in fabricating the best blue & green LEDs and the only commercially successful blue-violet semiconductor lasers. In late 1999, Shuji took his show “on the road” by taking an engineering position at the University of California, Santa Barbara to work on new designs for his gallium nitride LEDs. But Nichia America is still where to turn for the best and brightest nitride-type LEDs. For the record, Nichia also manufactures phosphor-based white LEDs. Those things use a blue LED chip coated
