Someone recently commented on the phosphor wearing out in
white LED's.  That made me ask two questions:

1.  How long do they last?  Conventional LED's usually outlive the
device they are in.

2.  If they depend upon a phosphor, what is the persistency?
It occurred to me that it would be neat to have a nice pilot lamp on
some piece of gear that could also do double duty as a data or carrier
transmitter.  Regular IR or red LED's can be driven up in to the
megahertz with no trouble at all.  The challenge is usually in finding
a suitable photo cell that can recover the signal.

        If a white LED burns out or dims out after a few hundreds or
thousands of hours, it isn't that much of an improvement over a small
incandescent bulb except maybe for the energy efficiency factor.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group

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