Introduction
LED lighting offers many potential benefi ts over incandescent, halogen, fl uorescent and gas/arc lamps, and lighting designers are eager to take advantage of those benefi ts. While the market for retrofi tting is immense, it is the ground-up design of solid-state lighting that truly exhilarates the lighting design community. To succeed in an LED lamp design three major pieces must be carefully managed. These pieces are the electrical drive, thermal management, and the optics. The lighting designer who can successfully balance all three can enjoy the benefi ts of solid state lighting: long life, high electrical efficiency, high luminous effi cacy and pure color (or tightly controlled color temperature for white LEDs).
