Haitz's Law¶

The empirical LED regularity that light output per package rises ~20x per decade while cost per lumen falls ~10x — a log-linear trajectory arising because half a dozen loss terms improve multiplicatively, used as a roadmap and a below-trend diagnostic until efficiencies hit their thermodynamic ceilings.

Core Idea¶

Haitz's law (Roland Haitz, ~1999) is the empirical regularity that light output per LED package rises by roughly 20x per decade while cost per lumen falls roughly 10x — a doubling in lumens-per-package every 18-24 months. It is not one advance but the multiplicative compounding of several loss-reduction axes (internal quantum efficiency, light extraction, current handling, thermal management, phosphor conversion, yield), yielding a log-linear trajectory. It is the solid-state-lighting analogue of Moore's law.

Scope of Application¶

Haitz's law applies within optoelectronics, to device classes whose performance is the multiplicative product of several independently-improving loss terms under sustained R&D.

LED device design — the home turf, where roadmaps scope new chip generations.
Solid-state-lighting industry strategy — capacity and fabrication-line planning on the doubling schedule.
Solid-state-lighting public policy — efficiency mandates timed to Haitz-trajectory cost crossovers.
Optoelectronic cousins — infrared LEDs, UV-LEDs, and laser diodes at different rates and offsets.
Display economics — micro-LED and mini-LED backplanes inheriting a slower version of the trajectory.

Clarity¶

Stating Haitz's law turns a vague sense that "LEDs keep getting brighter and cheaper" into a quantitative baseline against which any chip generation can be judged. That makes progress diagnostic: a below-trend generation is evidence of a binding constraint deserving research, not just disappointment. It makes the adoption horizon a calculation rather than a guess, and — framed as a law named for an observed trajectory — it keeps sharp that this is a time-bounded regularity, not a permanent physical guarantee.

Manages Complexity¶

An LED package's performance is the joint product of half a dozen loss terms evolving on their own timescales. Modeling that coupled system would mean tracking all six. Haitz's law collapses it onto a single scalar: because the terms enter multiplicatively, their compounded effect is a log-linear trajectory with one doubling time. The engineer carries a rate constant and a baseline, reading adoption timing, the below-trend diagnostic, and the eventual deceleration off one line.

Abstract Reasoning¶

The law licenses crossover-date arithmetic (computing when an application priced out by factor N becomes affordable), diagnostic reasoning (a below-trend generation points at the binding loss term), boundary-drawing (refusing to extrapolate the line past the thermodynamic ceilings), and a compounding-from-multiplicative-axes account explaining why the line held across decades and where it becomes vulnerable when several terms saturate at once.

Knowledge Transfer¶

Within optoelectronics Haitz's law transfers as mechanism — the log-linear line, the crossover arithmetic, the below-trend diagnostic, and the ceiling-deceleration boundary carry to IR-LEDs, UV-LEDs, and laser diodes, each a genuine instance. Beyond it, the famous companions (Moore's, Swanson's, Wright's laws) are not exports but siblings under a shared parent — the experience/learning_curve prime — differing only in product class and slope. The cross-domain lesson carries that parent, including its eventual deceleration; the LED-specific loss axes and figures are optoelectronics furniture that stays home.

Relationships to Other Abstractions¶

Current abstraction Haitz's Law Domain-specific

Parents (1) — more general patterns this builds on

Haitz's Law is a kind of Learning Curve Effects Prime

Haitz's Law is a Learning Curve Effect specialized to LED packages whose light output rises and unit cost falls predictably with cumulative engineering and production experience.

Hierarchy paths (3) — routes to 3 parentless roots

Haitz's Law → Learning Curve Effects → Increasing Returns

Show alternative paths (2)

Neighborhood in Abstraction Space¶

Haitz's Law sits in a sparse region of the domain-specific corpus (97^th percentile for distinctiveness): few abstractions share its structure, so a faithful description tends to retrieve it precisely.

Family — Unclustered & Miscellaneous (309 abstractions)

Nearest neighbors

Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-07-12