Soraa Founder Shuji Nakamura Receives Top Lighting Industry Honors

FREMONT, California, Jan. 8, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Soraa, the world leader in the development of gallium nitride on gallium nitride (GaN on GaN™) LED technology, announced today that one of its founders, Dr. Shuji Nakamura, was recently honored by Lux Review Magazine as their "Person of the Year" and was inducted into Electronic Design's Hall of Fame for his outstanding work in the lighting industry.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20131211/NY30470 )

The Lux Awards, jointly organized by Lux Magazine and the Lighting Industry Association, are designed to reward both creativity and sustainability. In conferring the award, Lux Magazine referred to Dr. Nakamura as "the man who single-handedly created the current LED revolution", and whose work is "benefitting all humanity".

At the end of each year, the editors of Electronic Design select a group of new inductees based on level of contribution, industry impact, lasting achievement and feedback from its readers for the publication's Engineering Hall of Fame. In selecting Dr. Nakamura the editors' wrote, "Shuji Nakamura enabled an entire industry based on high-brightness LEDs replacing incandescent, gas-discharge, and fluorescent lighting in vehicles, homes, businesses, and outdoors. He did it by developing a practical way to manufacture efficient blue and ultraviolet LEDs, which are the basis for 'white' LEDs."

"I'm very honored that both publications took the time and effort to honor my work," said Shuji Nakamura, Founder of Soraa, inventor of the blue and white LED and professor at the Materials Department of the College of Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara. "Lighting affects the way we see the world, and good light can make anything more compelling. Creating efficient lighting products that do not compromise on performance, offer the highest quality available, and greatly reduce energy waste has always been a driving principle of my work and was the motivation for creating Soraa."

In 2007, Dr. Nakamura, inventor of the blue laser and blue LED, along with pioneering professors Dr. Steven DenBaars and Dr. James Speck, came together and made a bet on an LED technology platform completely different than current industry practice, a technology most industry experts at the time considered to be impossible to execute.

Soraa bet that GaN on GaN™ LEDs would produce more light per area of LED and be more cost-effective than technology based on other foreign substrates like sapphire or silicon carbide.  This strategy ran against every trend in the LED industry. That bet paid off: today, Soraa's LEDs emit more light per LED material than any other LED; handle more electric current per area than any other LED; and its GaN on GaN crystals are up to a thousand times purer than any other LED crystal.

"Shuji is simply brilliant and well deserving of these two honors. Largely as a result of his work, Soraa has been able to push the boundaries of what is possible in high performance LED lighting," said Jeff Parker, CEO of Soraa. "Soraa's GaN on GaN™ LED lamps are now regarded as the best in the world, with quality of light that far surpasses any other LED product—whites look whiter, colors are rendered more vividly, and shadows are crisp and clean."

Dr. Nakamura was born on May 22, 1954 in Ehime, Japan.  He obtained B.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tokushima, Japan in 1977, 1979, and 1994, respectively. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Nishina Memorial Award (1996), the Materials Research Society Medal Award (1997), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Jack A. Morton Award, the British Rank Prize (1998), the Benjamin Franklin Medal Award (2002), the Millennium Technology Prize (2006), the Czochralski Award (2007), the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical Scientific Research (2008), The Harvey Award (2009), and the Technology & Engineering Emmy Award (2012) awarded by The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS). He was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2003.

Since 2000, he has been a professor of Materials at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds more than 100 patents and has published more than 400 papers in his field. Dr. Nakamura is also the Research Director of the Solid State Lighting & Energy Center.

For more information on the Lux Review award, visit: http://www.luxreview.com/news/94/lux-awards-2013-the-winners. For more information on Electronic Design's Hall of Fame, visit: http://electronicdesign.com/engineering-hall-fame/gallery-2013-engineering-hall-fame#slide-2-field_images-97521.

About Soraa
Pioneering lamps using LEDs built from pure gallium nitride substrates (GaN on GaN™), Soraa has made ordinary lighting extraordinarily brilliant and efficient. Soraa's full spectrum GaN on GaN™ LED lamps have superior color rendering and beam characteristics compared to lamps using LEDs created from non-native substrates. Founded in 2008, Soraa is located in Fremont California, where it manufactures its GaN on GaN™ LEDs in the company's state-of-the-art facility. For additional information, please visit www.soraa.com.

Soraa Media Contact:
Andy Beck
Makovsky  
abeck@makovsky.com
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