Fluency Lighting Technologies is an early stage start-up company developing technology out of UC Santa Barbara. At Fluency, we are creating next-generation bright and narrow-beam light sources for highly efficient illumination, using laser technology and materials design. Our focus is the development of low-cost, optical platforms that convert laser diode emission into high-quality white light in various light levels, beam angles, and color temperatures, designed for customer-driven metrics, in applications where energy-saving LED technology is not used because of the limited light output from an LED.

In this talk I will highlight the history of GaN research at UCSB, and some of the key breakthroughs and technologies developed by the faculty, students and staff.  Starting with one MOCVD system, UCSB Faculty were the first University world-wide to achieve a blue GaN Laser in 1996. In 2000, Prof. Shuji Nakamura joined the Faculty and along with Prof. DenBaars, Prof. Speck and Prof. Mishra co-founded the Solid State Lighting and Energy Electronics Center (SSLEEC), which has now become one of the largest academic GaN based Photonic and Electronic research centers in the world. SSLEEC has played a key role in developing numerous breakthroughs, some of which have led to the realization of high-efficiency Solid-State Lighting, which the Dept. of Energy estimates will save the equivalent annual electrical output of about fifty 1,000-megawatt power plants. 

​Looking into the future we see next generation GaN Laser Diode based solid state lighting as impacting high brightness specialty lighting. We have demonstrated laser based white lighting with luminous efficacies of 87 lm/watt, and over 1000 lumens from a single emitter.  In addition, tunnel junctions have been employed to achieve vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) in the blue spectral region. Blue and green lasers and Micro-LEDs based on GaN materials are expected to enable new full color projections displays for cinema, office and augmented reality (AR) applications.