Dick Stanley Austin American-Statesman

UT Austin research engineer sees wider spectrum of uses for LEDs Next time you see a Ford Thunderbird's taillights winking in the dark, think of Russell Dupuis and the race to make a white LED. The electrical engineering professor at The University of Texas at Austin helped develop the bright red LEDs--those light-emitting diodes that indicate when a VCR is on--that Hewlett-Packard Company has been making for Thunderbirds since 1993. Dupuis and his graduate students now are working with Hewlett-Packard to combine red LEDs with green and blue ones recently developed by the Japanese to make long-lasting white LED replacements for incandescent light bulbs. "They'd be used in the high end first," Dupuis said. "In hospitals and cars until, at some point, the reliability and cost issues balance out. Eventually they will get into the home." White LEDs won't look any different from ordinary incandescent bulbs, but they might be permanent fixtures--possibly for the life of the building--like those red LED taillights on the Thunderbirds and, increasingly, Hondas. "The cars will be in the landfills before the LEDs," Dupuis said. "LED taillights can take more of a beating than an incandescent bulb from, say, slamming the trunk." In 1977 Dupuis gained fame among his peers by developing an efficient process for making LEDs called metalorganic chemical vapor deposition, or MOCVD. It allowed him to make LEDs that could be used as lasers. "He was responsible for the first injection lasers ever produced by MOCVD," said Fernando Ponce, an electrical engineer at Xerox Corp. "It's an LED with much higher performance that is now used to make compact discs and as a component in laser printers." Dupuis studied with the master. He got his doctorate at the University of Illinois in 1973 working with Nick Holonyak, maker of the first LED. For that and his subsequent work, Holonyak won the National Medal of Science. Today LEDs are available covering all the primary colors of the spectrum, at competitive prices, and with efficiencies greater than those obtained from incandescent tungsten filament lamps. When fashioned into an injection laser, Dupuis said, the blue Japanese LED should allow four times as much information on compact discs and four times better resolution for laser printers, resulting in photo-quality printing.