The dimmable bulb contains a filament-shaped LED coated in graphene. It was designed at Manchester University, where the material was discovered.
It is said to cut energy use by 10% and last longer owing to its conductivity. The National Graphene Institute at the university was opened this month.
The government has invested £38m in the National Graphene Institute via the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, with an additional £23m provided by the European Regional Development Fund.
Chancellor George Osborne, who opened the site on 20 March, has said he hopes the UK can see off competition from China and South Korea to become a centre of excellence in graphene technology.
More than 35 companies worldwide have already partnered with the university to develop projects.
I saw this story as well and I think it is awesome to see this new material come to market. What I can't wait to see is CPU's that use it and what type of performance increases we will get.
I'm glad to see they might actually make a product with it, but a light bulb is a far cry from a high end processor and with it only providing a 10% energy savings, I have to wonder if it will be worth purchasing the bulb for anything other than cool factor.
A high end processor? You sure are difficult to please. If it can give 10% energy savings over LEDs, with comparable performance otherwise, I find it pretty impressive. The first time it was ever man-made was in 2004, after all.
The article isn't very clear if the energy use is 10% less than LEDs or Incandescent bulbs, I will go ahead and assume it uses less than a standard led, which is cool because it seems to distribute light the same as an incandescent bulb.
true but the article is still scarce with the details. These bulbs would look cool, I hate CFLs and most led ones are either too expensive or cheaply made and fail.
I get that. The thing I'm pointing out is that multiple researchers have been working on this material for over a decade. In fact, as mentioned in the article, there is an institute dedicated to this alone.
This material has been proposed many times to be used to create the high end processors and many other electronics. So for all the effort they have come up with a product that saves only 10% energy consumption on an LED which already drew nominal amounts of power. Do you think this will be cheaper than normal LEDs? If not, how long would it take to get an ROI?
I'm not saying I don't want them to keep working on this, I want them to keep it up, but at this rate, even taking into account the exponential rate of improvement technology tends to have, it would seem we have another decade or two for this be to viable to replace silicon which we can already see an end of life for.
Yes I wasn't trying to straw man you, just poking a bit of fun ;). My guess is that we're going to see graphene in a lot of other fields before it is competing against silicon in CPUs. It would be cool to be wrong though. I just think that at this stage we're going to have to live with small incremental steps in it's development before it's suddenly ubiquitous.