The participation of TEMATYS was supported by EPIC. 
Smart Lighting 2014 in Barcelona… It’s no more about lumen per watt but lumen for what.
More than 200 experts from the smart lighting worldwide community attended the international conference in Barcelona, Spain on 7-8 May 2014 to discuss about future opportunities driven by the arrival of electronic light in our daily life. The coming revolution we now face is nothing less than what is impacting worldwide pharmaceuticals companies’ business for the last 5 years. As personalized medicine is to give the right prevention and treatment for the right patient at the right time and is deeply changing the rules of the game in the health sector, key speakers in Barcelona don’t tell us anything different by pointing out the modification in the former bulb mass-market moving towards highly customized LED based luminaires. What is required in the next years is the right photon (amber, red, blue…), at the right time (morning, evening, midday…), spatially distributed (beside the wall, the window) and – last but not least – carrying information, in an ubiquitous merging of lighting, sensing and communication. If the LEDification (cited by Olivia Qiu, Philips) was about the introduction of just another efficient light source, the current digitization of light results in a paradigm shift for the lighting industry at large, and as for every tectonic displacement, earthquake and eruption will attend everywhere they are not expected. Nevertheless, the 60 conference and the 22 exhibitors presented interesting perspectives to identify the key “faults line” to survey. For photonics companies, the entry points in these future smart lighting applications are various and should not be limited to LEDs chipmakers even not LED-luminaires manufacturers.
A few years ago, in conferences on Solid State Lighting, speakers mainly dealt with the phosphors, wafer processing, epitaxy, substrate and packaging and main issues were in the required investment to reach 5% in cost reduction of each of these building blocks. In the 2014 session, numerous sessions dealt with interoperability, standardization, as a proof of the industrial maturity of this technology. But in the coming years, after this phase of market consolidation, innovation in the 50b€ “illumination market” will be based on sensors and applications for “integrated building management”, using the potential of electronic light. As mentioned by experts in Smart Lighting 2014, these devices will be key in the future and photonics in its dual aspect of lighting and sensing will be one of the key technologies in this industry when price and manufacturing will reach the adequate level for commercialization.
Prepared by: Jacques Cochard, Partner jcochard@tematys.com