Welcome to a special ultraviolet (UV) edition of the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Oct. 30, 2020. Germicidal UV is quite simply the hottest topic in our solid-state lighting (SSL) world given the continuing pandemic. We decided to publish this special Friday newsletter to aggregate some of our UV-centric content and to also tell you a bit about our forward-looking plans for the UV subject.

UV LED technology in general continues to trail the maturation of visible-light LEDs substantially. UV-A (315–400-nm) and UV-B (280–315-nm) LEDs are widely used in applications such as curing. UV-C band (100–280-nm) LEDs that can deactivate a virus such as SARS-CoV-2 remain more costly, and produce lower levels of radiometric energy. Further UV-C LEDs have relatively short lifetimes.

But the LED manufacturers are rushing to overcome the challenges that UV-C presents. Back in July, we had a contributed article written by long-time LED expert Mike Krames. That article described the architectural differences of UV-C LEDs relative to blue LEDs along with potential concepts that will ultimately deliver more powerful UV-C LEDs.

We also published a recent column that suggests some application scenarios in which UV-C LEDs can serve today. Bob Karlicek and Leah Scott of the Center for Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications (LESA) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute noted applications such as pulsed UV-C LEDs have great potential.

Moreover, you will find other content on our site that’s focused on germicidal UV-C concepts. A midweste...