Light-emitting Diode - Applications

Applications

In general, all the LED products can be divided into two major parts, the public lighting and indoor lighting. LED uses fall into four major categories:

• Visual signals where light goes more or less directly from the source to the human eye, to convey a message or meaning.
• Illumination where light is reflected from objects to give visual response of these objects.
• Measuring and interacting with processes involving no human vision.
• Narrow band light sensors where LEDs operate in a reverse-bias mode and respond to incident light, instead of emitting light.

For more than 70 years, until the LED, practically all lighting was incandescent and fluorescent with the first fluorescent light only being commercially available after the 1939 World's Fair.