Breaking News
​
​QuarkStar Profiled in LEDs Magazine 

​LEDs Magazine's new department provides an inside look at a leading individual or firm involved in the LED and SSL manufacturing, design, and supply chain. Our first subject is SSL technology developer QuarkStar, which recently won an L-Prize.
​Wanda Lau
​June 2, 2022

QuarkStar Wins DOE L-Prize®
​(Phase 1)
In partnership with Nichia

DOE L-Prize Phase 1 Winner is QuarkStar – The Announcement
by Jennifer M. Granholm,
​U.S. Secretary of Energy

QuarkStar is thrilled to be a WINNER of DOE’s L-Prize (Phase 1), part of a multi-million-dollar competition to energize U.S. commercial lighting innovation.

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A decade ago DOE awarded our very first L-Prize to a technology you might have heard about a little bit – an LED replacement for the everyday lightbulb... the purpose was to raise the bar for lighting efficiency, quality, connectivity, and environmental footprint. And this time we are really targeting transformational innovations to light commercial buildings. ​

―Jennifer M. Granholm, U.S. Secretary of Energy

“Currently available technologies and systems may excel in one performance area, but often at the expense of others … a key innovation of this L-Prize is that a winning system must demonstrate exceptional achievement in all areas.” 

QuarkStar's L-Prize Winning Submission with Nichia partnership

To make these ambitions real, the Project Tango team of QuarkStar and Nichia made use of:

For more information see our press release.
And feel free to reach out directly to us. Thank you.

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The Ultimate Debut for a New Lighting Technology

Lighting the galleries of the largest museum project in North America › 

QuarkStar Lights Up a Galaxy of Art:  QuarkStar is the primary lighting supplier ​for the centerpiece building of the largest museum project in North America, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's Rich and Nancy Kinder Building.

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"Subtle LED lighting that achieves remarkably consistent illumination"
Wall Street Journal
Photo credits - Richard Barnes

"QuarkStar’s revolutionary technology bridges the natural and artificial"

"QuarkStar’s Edge-X technology delivers something previously never before seen in the lighting world: evenly distributed sheets of light easily spanning 16-ft gallery walls and daylight matching color-tuning from a single row of LEDs"

LD+A Issue May 2021

Edge-X ›
A QuarkStar Lighting Technology

Discover Edge-X​ ›
General Technology Overview​

Explore What Edge-X Can Do For You ›
Applications and Distributions ​​​

​More QuarkStar Technologies ›
​Partnering Light with Space

Controls ›
​in Space, Time, and Color

• New ways to control light in Space, Time, & Color.
• Unparalleled Color & Lumen Maintenance over product lifetimes.
• New approaches to IoT Networking & Self-Commissioning.

Advanced Light Sources​ ›

Advanced Light Sources are Fixtures in a Package – offering large scale spatial control from package-sized sources. ​

Light Sheets and Filaments ​​›​

Linear arrays and Planar sources coupled to sophisticated optics.

Awards for QuarkStar Innovations

WINNER
​US DOE Next Generation Luminaire
Competition for Emerging Technology

​WINNER
US DOE 2022 L-Prize® Competition
​(Phase 1)​

​WINNER
US DOE Next Generation Luminaire
Competition for Asymmetric Lighting

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​Top Ten Products
LightFair
​

​One of the 20 Hottest
Lighting Companies in the World
​

​Best Innovation of
​Light+Building
(shared award)

Recent News (June 2022) ›

QuarkStar and Nichia Win US Department of Energy L-Prize (Phase 1) Competition  June 2022

QuarkStar, a deep tech startup dedicated to advancements in solid-state lighting, along with its L-Prize® partner Nichia, the world's largest supplier of LEDs, are honored to have their submission "Project Tango" chosen as a winner in the U.S. Department of Energy's L-Prize Phase 1 competition. The results were announced personally by the U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm...

Read more ›​

Profiles in Lighting: QuarkStar  June 2022

LEDs Magazine's new department provides an inside look at a leading individual or firm involved in the LED and SSL manufacturing, design, and supply chain. Our first subject is SSL technology developer QuarkStar, which recently won an L-Prize...

Read more ›​

L-Prize Concept Phase winners propose next-generation SSL design  June 2022

During the Department of Energy (DOE) Solid-State Lighting R&D Workshop on Feb. 3, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced the winners of the Concept Phase of DOE’s latest L-Prize competition. The program aims to spark innovation with interoperable LED lighting systems in commercial building applications. These systems can include LED luminaires, sensors, control devices, and interfaces...

Read more ›

LED innovations transform SSL market prospects over two decades  January 2022​ 

Dr. Robert Steele, a co-founding member of Team QuarkStar, is considered the LED and SSL industry’s pioneer of market research and forecasting. In this 2022 article for LEDs Magazine, Dr Steele surveys the remarkable history of the LED, and the evolution of its applications and markets over the past two decades.​..

Read more ›

LD+A Magazine
​
Inside The Museum

Read article ›

Platinum Award Winner – QuarkStar

A new international award celebrating and rewarding innovation. QuarkStar was independently nominated for this new international award based on QuarkStar’s premier role in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s newly completed centerpiece building. To learn more about this innovative project and see an independent review of the QuarkStar technology...

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​Houston museum uses QuarkStar optics to uniformly light art galleries

Fixtures that hide within the building architecture and spectral tuning bring natural light effects into the exhibit spaces in the new Kinder Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The relatively diminutive optical element can spread LED light uniformly over extensive areas such as walls while allowing the solid-state lighting (SSL) fixture to be essentially hidden in a room’s architectural features or recessed into the ceiling. Meanwhile, a multi-channel LED light engine enables the museum lighting to match the abundant natural light that the building design draws into the public spaces and galleries...

​Read more ›

Ground-breaking optics debut in £330 million art gallery

INNOVATIVE lighting optics developed by technologists in the US are being used for the first time in a new £330 million (US$450 million) art gallery.QuarkStar’s radical Edge-X technology has been specified by top lighting design practice L’Observatoire International for the newly opened Kinder Building, centrepiece of a massive expansion to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The expansion was the largest fine art gallery project in North America in 2020, designed by US ‘starchitect’ Steven Holl...

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Technological breakthroughs: QuarkStar is 'completely changing the conceptual approach to lighting'

​The French publication Lux highlights QuarkStar’s Edge-X technology as a completely novel approach. “Holder of numerous patents, winner of many awards, the American start-up QuarkStar has completely rethought LED lighting in order to surpass current performances at all levels.”

​Read more ›

"Taking Optics-Based Beam Distribution to a Whole New Level"

"At the end of the day, optics in SSL applications serve the primary task of controlling beam distribution. [QuarkStar] takes that task to a new level... The company [QuarkStar] has developed some compelling demonstration optics, especially Edge-X for general illumination applications... "

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QuarkStar reinvents the downlight, finessing the limitations of glare

Winner of the Light+Building Lux Innovation Award, this is being called the first fundamental innovation in downlights in their 75 year history.This is a brand new downlight concept that makes use of the versatility and unprecedented performance capabilities of QuarkStar’s Edge-X technology. It has been further developed to significantly decrease the problems of glare, ubiquitous in traditional downlight designs. The first commercial products have an expected 2022 release...

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Sylvania licenses radical lens tech from US start-up

[Sylvania] has signed a deal to get access to the radical Edge-X technology from innovative US start-up QuarkStar. It’s understood the company will initially use the ‘light shaping’ lens development in its downlight and linear lighting ranges under the Concord brand. The Edge-X optics essentially guide the output from LEDs and sculpt the distribution of light in a space. One of the benefits to clients is that fewer luminaires are needed in a space to get the same effect as traditional optics...

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Focus shifts from lumens to color
QuarkStar CTO's solution of the previously unsolved major problem of color shift prediction forms basis of new industry standard TM-35

"[The model] has the potential to change how the solid-state lighting (SSL) industry utilizes test and measurement guidance, and effectively end the notion that the lumen is the only light characteristic that matters with regard to LED lifetime performance..."​

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QuarkStar presents two keynote talks at the 20th Anniversary  Strategies in Light

As a team composed of industry experts with decades of collective experience in the SSL industry and Silicon Valley entrepreneurial know-how, QuarkStar is uniquely positioned to provide perspectives on the development of the LED lighting industry and where its future is leading. 20 Years of Strategies in Light: Reflections on the Evolution of the LED Industry​ presented by Dr. Robert Steele, QuarkStar’s chief market analyst and founder and co-chair of Strategies in Light and From Black Death to White Light": The LED Revolution That Almost Didn’t Happen presented by Dr. Eric Bretschneider, QuarkStar CTO and ​Chair of the IES Solid-State Lighting Subcommittee...

​​​Read more ›​

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More News and In-depth Discussions › 

Intellectual Property Portfolio​ ›

QuarkStar:
​A Universe of Innovation

500+ patents filed (US, EU, CN, JP)
250+ patents granted
(with new patents every month)

Current applications
       ●  Industrial
       ●  Commercial
       ●  Horticulture
       ●  Automotive
       ●  LiFi & IoT
       ●  LED filament bulbs

Our IP portfolio of over 500 patent applications, with >50% already granted, provides our partners with protected technologies that overcome current limitations of solid-state lighting.​

Learn more ›