Guest Editorial Special Issue on LED Drivers

When in 1907, Henry Joseph Round (1881–1966) published “
A Note on Carborundum
,” in Electrical World, 49, pp. 309, reporting the electroluminescence effect on a carborundum (SiC) crystal, little he knew about the huge impact that his discovery would cause in the lighting industry 100 years later. Unfortunately, carborundum proved impractical for light production, mainly due to its very low conversion efficiency. Thus, it was not until the early 1960s, when the first commercial GaAs-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) were produced. Since then, LED technology has experienced a continuous improvement, especially intense during the 1990s, which led to the great number of applications that we can enjoy nowadays.