South Korea-based Seoul Semiconductor and Japan-based Toshiba Materials held a press conference in Frankfurt, Germany announcing a new packaged LED technology call SunLike due from Seoul this summer that is based in part on a Toshiba phosphor technology called TRI-R. The LEDs are promised to deliver a uniform and broad spectral power distribution (SPD) that is more like sunlight than are typical phosphor-converted white LEDs. The LEDs will utilize a purple emitter and a red, green, and blue (RGB) phosphor mix to render colors accurately and to eliminate the blue energy peak associated with LEDs based on blue pumps.

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Katsuhiro Shinosawa, director and chief marketing executive of Toshiba Materials, said LEDs based on the TRI-R phosphor will achieve scores near 100 on both the Rf (fidelity) and Rg (gamut) metrics that are defined in the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) TM-30 standard. The IES released that standard in 2015 as a replacement for CRI, although TM-30 has still not been globally adopted. The nearby image depicts SPDs of a conventional LED (right) and a TRI-R-based LED (left).

As mentioned earlier, the touted benefits of the SunLike LEDs include both the elimination of the blue peak and the excellent color rendering. The blue peak of LEDs is still seen as a potential health hazard. Moreover, the blue energy is not efficiently used by the human visual system.