Lumileds 🇺🇸

📍 San Jose, California, USA

🏢 Founded 1999

🌍 Raw LED Diode & Chip Manufacturing

Overview Innovations Products Applications FAQs Resources

Company Overview

Lumileds is the invisible giant of the event lighting industry. Originally formed as a joint venture between Agilent Technologies and Philips Lighting, Lumileds does not manufacture the physical moving head fixtures you see on stage. Instead, they engineer and manufacture the raw, microscopic LED chips (the actual diodes) that provide the blinding light inside top-tier fixtures.

When a lighting manufacturer (like Martin or ClayPaky) wants to build a new flagship wash light, they turn to Lumileds for their LUXEON series of LED emitters. Lumileds fundamentally revolutionized the industry by creating LEDs capable of handling massive electrical currents, allowing a tiny 2mm chip to output blinding brightness without instantly burning up.

Beyond stage lighting, Lumileds is one of the world’s largest suppliers of automotive LED headlights and smartphone camera flashes. Their absolute mastery of phosphor chemistry dictates the Color Rendering Index (CRI) and color accuracy of the entire entertainment lighting industry.

Core Technologies

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LUXEON High-Power Architecture

Lumileds pioneered the high-power LED category. Before LUXEON, LEDs were just dim indicator lights on VCRs. Lumileds engineered thermal pathways that allowed massive power to run through the chip, creating the first LEDs bright enough to illuminate a stage.

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Advanced Phosphor Technology

Blue LEDs are converted to white light using a chemical phosphor coating. Lumileds’ proprietary Lumiramic phosphor technology ensures that every single LED chip produces the exact same color temperature of white, ensuring perfectly matched lighting across a massive stage.

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CSP (Chip Scale Package) LEDs

Eliminating the bulky plastic packaging around the LED. CSP technology strips the LED down to its bare semiconductor die, allowing fixture manufacturers to pack dozens of LEDs into a microscopic area for insanely dense, bright light engines.

Featured Solutions

LUXEON C Color Line

The gold standard for entertainment lighting. A flawless line of colored LEDs (Red, Green, Blue, Mint, Amber) designed with exactly the same focal length, allowing a fixture’s lens to mix the colors perfectly without a halo effect.

LUXEON CoB (Chip on Board)

Massive, highly dense arrays of white LEDs bonded directly to a metal substrate. These are heavily utilized in theatrical ellipsoidal fixtures (like Altman) to replicate the massive output of a tungsten bulb from a single source.

Automotive LED Matrix

While designed for cars, this technology—packing thousands of individually controllable microscopic LEDs into a single chip—is rapidly shaping the future of digital, pixel-mapped stage lighting.

Ideal Industry Deployments

💡 OEM Moving Head Light Engines

🚗 Global Automotive Headlights

📱 Smartphone Camera Flashes

🏥 High-CRI Medical Illumination

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I buy a Lumileds stage light?

No, Lumileds does not make finished light fixtures. They are an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) supplier. You buy a light fixture from a company like Martin or ADJ, and if you look closely inside the lens, you will likely see a Lumileds LUXEON chip powering it.

Why is the LUXEON C line important for color mixing?

In older LED lights, the Red LED chip might be slightly taller than the Blue chip. When the lens tries to mix them, it creates an ugly multi-colored shadow on the stage. The LUXEON C line engineers every color chip to have the exact same height and focal point, resulting in flawless, single-source color mixing.

What does a Phosphor coating do?

A white LED is actually just a royal blue LED covered in a yellow chemical powder called phosphor. The blue light excites the phosphor, which glows yellow. The mix of blue and yellow creates white light. Lumileds’ mastery of this chemical mix determines if the white light looks warm (like a sunset) or cold (like a hospital).