Shuji Nakamura, founder of Soraa Lighting, is one of three researchers awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on blue light-emitting diodes, which made today's LED lighting possible.Dr. Shuji Nakamura, one of the founders of Soraa, Fremont, Calif., an LED manufacturer, has been awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics. The Nobel committee recognized Nakamura’s invention, the blue light emitting diode (LED), as a major advancement in LED lighting, and said his LED innovation “has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources.”
“I am very honored to receive the Nobel Prize from The Royal Swedish Academy of Science for my invention of the blue LED,” said Nakamura in a press release. “It is very satisfying to see that my dream of LED lighting has become a reality. I hope that energy-efficient LED light bulbs will help reduce energy use and lower the cost of lighting worldwide, and that is why we founded Soraa.”
A Soraa press release said that in 2007 Dr. Shuji Nakamura, along with pioneering professors Dr. Steven DenBaars and Dr. James Speck, came together and made a bet on an LED technology platform completely different than current industry practice, a technology most industry experts at the time considered to be impossible to execute.
Soraa bet that gallium nitride (GaN on GaN) LEDs would produce more light per area of LED and be more cost-effective than technology based on other foreign substrates like sapphire or silicon carbide. This strategy ran against every trend in the LED industry. That bet paid off. Soraa says that today its LEDs emit more light per LED material than any other LED; handle more electric current per area than any other LED; and its GaN on GaN crystals are up to a thousand times purer than any other LED crystal.
“We knew that our GaN on GaN LED technology would be the future of lighting and Soraa has made this a reality,” said Nakamura.
