For widespread adoption in general-purpose illumination applications, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) must reliably produce a substantial amount of white light at a reasonable cost. While several white LED technologies appear capable of meeting the implicit technical requirements for illumination, their high purchase price (relative to traditional light sources) has heretofore impeded their market advancement. Binary complementary white (BCW) LED illuminators, first introduced commercially in late 1997, appear to offer great potential for addressing the commercial and technical demands of general-purpose illumination applications. Many properties of BCW LED systems derive from AlInGaP LED chips, the source of up to 80% of the luminous flux projected from BCW devices. This configuration yields a number of benefits, relative to other white LED approaches, including high luminous efficacy, low cost per lumen, and high luminous flux per discrete component. This document describes BCW illumination systems in detail, beginning with a review of generic LED attributes, basic illumination requirements and applied photometric and colorimetric techniques.
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