About ten years ago the best stockpicker I know told me he was looking at CREE. The pitch was "They have 'blue'". I didn't pay much attention, the Nasdaq was starting it's blow-off run, from around 1500 to 5048 in 18 months.Blue is important.
Cree went from $3 to $93....
These days CREE is back around $33.
From cnet:
Efficient, useful blue-light LED draws Nobel Prize in physics
Three researchers helped revolutionize lighting with vastly better energy efficiency and brightness. The light-emitting diodes also are used in data storage, TVs, and smartphones.
Baffled by Higgs bosons, quantum mechanics, and the accelerating expansion of the universe? This year's physics Nobel Prize is for something that's reassuringly understandable and useful: the blue LEDs used in everything from home lighting and headlights to TV screens and traffic signals.
Three researchers received the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for the invention of this blue light-emitting diode (LED), a technology now used in high-speed networking, data storage, smartphones, water purification, and efficient home illumination.
The winners are Isamu Akasaki, a Japanese citizen and professor at Meijo University and Nagoya University; Hiroshi Amano, a Japanese citizen and professor at Nagoya University; and Shuji Nakamura, an American citizen and professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara.
The key advantage of their invention 20 years ago is the production of light with far less waste of electrical energy than with preceding technologies like incandescent and fluorescent lights, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in awarding the prize.
"A quarter of energy consumption goes to illumination," said Per Delsing, a physics professor at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, during a press conference announcing the award. As a result, any increase in efficiency and consequent saving of energy "is really going to have a big impact on modern civilization," he said.
Nobel Prizes in physics often go to fundamental discoveries such as the Higgs Boson. But when the committee makes an award for an invention, "we really emphasize the usefulness of the invention," said Anne L'Huillier, an atomic physics professor at Lund University in Sweden, also speaking at the press conference. And the blue LED is nothing if not useful.
Recent Nobel prizes have been awarded for concepts that are very far from day-to-day human experiences -- giant magnetoresistance, Bose-Einstein condensates, superconductors and superfluids, and the accelerating expansion of the universe, for example. The blue LED -- something you can buy at the local home-improvement store -- seems downright mundane by comparison.
But it's anything but ordinary, said H. Frederick Dylla, chief executive officer of the American Institute of Physics, who called the work a "tour de force" because it required a combination of materials science, physics, and chemistry. Indeed, the invention of the blue LED was on a short list of his institute's candidates for the prize, he said....MORE
