The Cree Royal Blue XTE LED is a specially designed diode from Cree which delivers a very strong output of blue light at 445 nm and optimized for use in remote phosphor LED applications. Remote phosphor LEDs are those which have a coating of phosphors somewhat removed from the LED light itself – all white LEDs are a local phosphor design – very much like fluorescent lamps have an outer coating of phosphor to produce white light of various colors.
Although we have not yet seen much in the way of remote phosphor LEDs in the aquarium market, these have been seen mostly in household lighting designs, the new Royal Blue XTE LED from Cree will be better able to produce white light by exciting phosphors in a remote design. Not only does the XLamp XTE Royal Blue have exceptional output of 525mW at 350mA, more importantly the XTE Royal Blue LEDs are binned in 2.5nm increments so getting a more precise excitation for remote phosphors will be better than ever.
It will be interesting to see if remote-phosphor LEDs ever make it into the aquarium market but in the meantime we can look forward to seeing performance gains of this XTE Royal Blue trickle down into future models of the juicy blue light emitting diode.
[Cree]
