Eden Park to Bring a New Type of Lighting to Market

It’s a light source that works like a plasma TV.

Eden Park, a small startup in Somerset, New Jersey that came out of the labs of the University of Illinois, is creating what it calls microplasma lights that will produce 30 lumens of light or more per watt. In these lights, two glass or plastic panels create a sandwich. Inside the sandwich sits an aluminum mesh dotted with microcavities filled with phosphors. When a current is passed through the sandwich, the phospors get excited and light is generated. You’re looking at a prototype in the picture.

One of the more interesting parts of the technology is the format. Like plasma TVs, plasma lights can be both large and thin. Imagine a wall covered in panels that emanate light. (Effects with color and brightness, depending on what the customer wants, can also be tuned.) LEDs produce more lumens per watt than plasma lights, but you’d need several LEDs in an array to get this kind of wall-of-light effect.

“You can also do double-sided,” said Clara Powell, vice president of marketing and business development. “We won’t start with that but you can do it.”

The company will initially use glass panels, but it is likely that it will sell lights made with lighter plastic sheets at some point. Employing plastic will also let Eden produce curved lights. Other companies, such as Ceelite and Universal Display, are also working on flat, flexible lights, but use different underlying technologies (flexible capacitors and OLEDs, respectively). Plasma lights, however, will have active lifetimes and brightness that will compete quite well against these other technologies.

Lighting, of course, remains one of the more active areas for venture investors in greentech.

The company will announce its product specifications, availability and other information at LightFair International taking place next May in New York City. The first products will likely hit 30 lumens per watt, but in the lab the company is already seeing higher results.

Eden Park, by the way, is not a town or civic center in Somerset. It is a concatenation of the names of the founders Professors Gary Eden and Sung-Jin Park at the University of Illinois.