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EPA Sets New Timeline for Energy Star Program Enhancements for 2010
SSLighting Design News Staff
November 5, 2009...Alex Baker, the Energy Star program manager with United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent a letter to Energy Star stakeholders which states, that before November 30, 2009, DOE and EPA will release a more detailed proposal outlining
anticipated Energy Star program enhancements for 2010. These program enhancements will include a proposed method of integrating various elements of the Energy Star lighting program.
He stated in the letter, "Among other things, it is
EPA’s intention to streamline the qualification process and paperwork related to ENERGY
STAR qualification of lighting products, as part of the process of integrating potentially
duplicative and overlapping specifications. Please note that it is also EPA’s intention to retain
key elements of the DOE-developed Energy Star specifications for Solid State Lighting and
Integral LED Lamps, including testing according to the IES LM-79 standard, as appropriate." Letter to Energy Star Stakeholders,
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Mitsubishi Corp. Reaches Settlement with Professor Gertrude Neumark Rothschild in Patent Dispute
LIGHTimes News Staff
November 5, 2009...Professor Gertrude Neumark Rothschild has reportedly reached a settlement with Mitsubishi Corp. regarding her assertion that the company and dozens of other major electronics manufacturers in Asia and Europe violated her patents for producing LEDs and laser diodes in products.
Mitsubishi is only the latest in a long list of companies to settle with Rothschild, a professor emeritus at Columbia University. Others who have settled include BenQ, Dalien Lumei, Epistar Corp., FOREPI, Guangzhou Hongli, Hitachi, Hugo Optotech, LG, Motorola, Pioneer Corp., Samsung Electro Mechanics, Samsung Electronics, Sanyo Electric, Sewa Electric, Sharp Corp., Shenzhen Unilight, Showa Denko, Sony Corp., and Sony Ericcson. Earlier settlements were made with Nichia Chemical and Koninklijke Philips Electronics, which included Philips Lumilid Lighting Co. and Toyoda Gosei Co. Ltd.(Ref: Previous Articles and News Releases), Troutman Sanders LLP. News Release
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Osram Produces 104 lm/W Warm White LED Prototype; Introduces Ambient Light Sensor
LIGHTimes News Staff
November 5, 2009...Osram Opto Semiconductors has created a prototype white LED that the company says provides warm white light, high efficiency, and true colors. Osram Opto also introduced its SFH 5712 light sensor that it says detects ambient brightness in the same way as the human eye.
Osram Opto Semiconductors developed a white LED with a 3000K color temperature, that operates at 104 lm/W and has a color rendering index of 82.
The company points out that the prototype therefore offers three important properties that together are essential for general illumination applications.
The LED prototype reportedly uses A new converter mix that Osram is currently testing in its development laboratory to provide the pleasant warm white light. Osram Opto Semiconductors LED Prototype News Release, Osram Opto Semiconductor Ambient Light Sensor News Release
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LRC Demonstrates Photometry System for More Efficient Streetlighting Designs
LIGHTimes News Staff
November 3, 2009...Researchers from the Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute demonstrated in multiple field tests that, by using what they refer to as the Unified System of Photometry, a street lighting system can be designed to reduce energy use while maintaining or improving perceptions of visibility, safety, and security.
“In nighttime conditions, the human eye is more sensitive to short-wavelength light, which produces ‘cool’ tones like blue or green, as opposed to long-wavelength light, which produces ‘warm’ tones like yellow and red,” said LRC Director of Energy Programs Peter Morante. “By replacing traditional, yellowish high-pressure sodium (HPS) lights with ‘cool’ white light sources, such as induction, fluorescent, ceramic metal halide, or LEDs, we can actually reduce the amount of electric power used for lighting while maintaining or even improving visibility in nighttime conditions.”
LRC News Release
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Epistar Achieves 110lm/W Warm White 1W and 3W LEDs
LIGHTimes News Staff
November 3, 2009...Epistar of Hsinchu, Taiwan reports that it has achieved 110lm/W with 1W and 3W warm white LEDs. The company reportedly demonstrated these devices at LEDs 2009 conference in San Diego, California.
Epistar says it has developed a technology to reach high color rendering index (CRI) and high efficacy for warm white LED to replace the low efficacy incandescent light bulbs. Efficacy and color rendering index (CRI) are the two major performance measures in the lighting industry using white light LEDs. However, increasing one usually decreases the other and vice versa. Epistar contends that its approach enables improvement of these two merits simultaneously.
The 1W package has the CRI of 90 and efficacy up to 110lm/W for lower voltage (15V) operation, and the 3W package has the CRI of 90 and efficacy up to 105lm/W for higher voltage (50V) operation. Both these packages have the CCT of around 3000K. The 1W lamp is combined with several Epistar’s blue and red LED chips in the same package, then coated with yellow/green phosphor. The power consumption and total lumens can be adjusted by modifying the combinations of the LED chips. The 3W lamp used one high-voltage monolithically integrated DC multiple-chip array combined with several Epistar’s red LED chips. Yellow-green phosphors were used in both 1W and 3W packages. The Epistar says that a bridge structure can be used with the 3W lamp to achieve the AC drive. Furthermore, these packages can be used in the E12/E14 candle light, E26/E27/GU10 light bulbs, PAR light and other applications for high efficacy warm white. Epistar News Release
SemiLEDs Switches to 4" Wafers to Meet Customer Demand for LED Luminaires
LIGHTimes News Staff
November 3, 2009...SemiLEDs Corporation of Boise, Idaho USA, announced the successful introduction of the Aixtron Close Coupled Showerhead Crius MOCVD system with 7x4 inch configuration from Aixtron into its 4” Fab. SemiLEDs reports that it has shifted its mass production of VLED to 4 inch wafers. According to SemiLEDs, the shift greatly increases production capacity to meet strong demand for high end applications, such as street or home lighting. SemiLEDs’ state of the art 4 inch LED Fab located in Taiwan will be able to produce 10KK high power VLED when running at full capacity.
SemiLEDs insists that mass production using 4 inch wafers increases its production capacity to keep pace with increasing demand and to shorten lead times for its customers; furthermore, as announced at the China SSL conference 2009, using I-core MvpLED chips, SemiLEDs’ packaging customers have achieved 120lm/watt cool white running at 350mA.
SemiLEDs News Release Our news features are reported
by the LIGHTimes staff writers.
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Summit 2009: What we learned
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
November 5, 2009...The 2009 SSL Design Summit just wrapped up its November 3-4 run in Jersey City, New Jersey, on the shores of the Hudson river, right across from Manhattan's world trade/financial district. Delivering a few beautiful evening views of the New York City skyline, it isn't hard to soak in the big picture of just how massive the opportunity for solid state lighting is. There are a lot of fixtures on that island, with many of them on 12 to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We also saw an economy in pain. New building is negligible, vacancies are clearly visible good ideas that save operational expenses are being welcomed. We took the hint from a number of beleaguered end of year travel budgets, and in consultation with our planned speakers, we have shifted the LA/Long Beach Summit out into early 2010, specifically Jan 20-21. We like water, and the venue we're finalizing with the shift is very "on the water". Logos and announcement changes are in process, so if you spot a leftover December date, fear not. (or, in the words of our hotel's "security command center" on Wednesday morning blared out nearly continuously from 5:45 to 6:15 am.... "please disregard the alarm"... may I disregard your "disregard" announcement and please go back to sleep now?). It's all good.
At this 2009 Summit, thought leaders came together and elements of the industry shared and learned. That's what it's all about, because frankly, there aren't all that many individuals involved in the process of leading a market. While 80/20 applies in many "numbers and results" types of analysis, when it comes to "the human factor", the "3% rule" is more the norm. That rule simply postulates that when 3% of the people have the passion to lead something, and it rings true with, the majority of the other 97%, the 3% can then proceed to make something happen. Revolutions come from the 3%. It happened in India with Ghandi and his followers, around the 1920s, and still earlier, with the 13 colonies that formed the United States when they had had enough with excess taxation and lack of representation to address their grievances. (Nothing personal against Great Britain, they just had a bit of a run going on. Similar numbers were in play when czarist Russia turned over, and when the French monarchy fell). It's human nature. Think about your high school prom planning committee, or the number of "superstars" in the typical sports organization, and you get the idea.
The Summit, as with our other conference events, has always been about the strength of the agenda. It's never just a list of topics and speakers thrown up based on whoever says "yes" to an invitation, or as a response to a "call for papers". It's a topic flow, based on the assessment of our informal advisory board, including the co-chairs, key contributors and our network of industry friends, all aimed at making the industry stronger and moving it forward faster. As one of our lighting decision-maker attendees wrote this morning, "This was the only seminar that I have had attended on SSL other than at Lightfair, and feel that it was not only complete in scope, but that the speakers really wanted to be there. As a past employee of [three huge names in lighting/lighting componentry], I just wanted to tell you that your effort, attitude and professionalism are world class." So what did we learn? One big thing was that these LED things are working really, really well. LED-based luminaires are still tricky to get right, but the LEDs aren't the sticking point any longer.
If we agree that the most fundamental burden of progress in solid state lighting falls upon the shoulders of the LED manufacturers, their understanding of where the technology can go, and how to get there, we're looking at a pretty select group of industry leaders that make a big difference. Sure there a few other smaller LED innovators that might bring forward such a good idea that they eventually join the leaders, but as it stands, if you have Osram, Nichia, Cree, and Lumileds in the same room, you're looking at the companies that are shaping the fundamental message of the LED lighting industry (no slight intended on Toyoda Gosei, Seoul Semi, or Epistar who are all big volume players, they're just not as prominent in shaping the impressions that a market such as ours is built on). What we heard from that group at the 2009 Summit was not so much what they were doing, but rather what they are learning in areas such as standards development, long term testing or while pushing the technology to it's limits (and guess what, the LED is definitely no longer even close to the weak link in the chain when it comes to luminaire color consistency or lifetimes). Be sure to check into the agenda to see what Osram's Jian Jiao and Cree's Ralph Tuttle, were there to share... and keep in mind the backstory that those learned gentlemen are also the past two chairs of the NGLIA.
One portion the engendered some lively discussion concerned Cree's findings that have come out of their LM-80 testing program, which in a nutshell is suggesting to Cree that depreciation curves for LEDs in their first 5000 hours may potentially be meaningless when it comes to predicting the ultimate (or 70% lumen maintenance aka "L70") lifetime of their devices. In Cree's testing, they found that while a number of factors will affect the variance and depreciation (or appreciation in some samples) of their power LEDs in the first 5000 hours, that after things settle down, they may be seeing a different, and much flatter depreciation curve. If that bears out in testing across their future product lines, and if other manufacturers see the same type of "2-step" curve down the road, it may ultimately cast some doubt on the specific relevance of the Energy Star commercial requirement requiring 94.1% lumen maintenance to be a presumed predictor of that minimum 35,000 hour lifetime that Energy Star is looking for. We don't intend to suggest that if a manufacturer can't make the 94.1% cut-off that the industry should simply "trust them" that things will flatten out later on and everything will be fine. The point is that such a 2-step curve, which appears to be there in some other manufacturer's LM-80 data, and which Cree reports it found when testing other manufacturer's products, might imply much longer lifetimes that any of us have imagined. I would throw in the personal analogy of when I purchased my first music CDs. It was brand new technology, and the best manufacturers of the day could offer was an expectation that "they should last at least 5 years", but that ultimately they didn't know if the materials would hold up over the long term. 20 years later, I haven't had a single CD from that original collection bite the dust due to material degradation.
At the luminaire level, we were pleased to hear from Lightolier (now Philips Lightolier), and Elumen, two companies that made the cut with regard to our vetting criteria, earning a place to talk product, not just theory. Both were able to offer keen insights into product consistency over time. In the case of Lightolier, VP of Strategic Development and Innovation Ken Czech, shared details on the Calculite product which was last year's "Most Innovative Product" winner at Light Fair International. The Calculite takes a remote phosphor approach as the way to isolate the customer from generational changes so that tomorrow's available downlight matches the brightness and color consistency. The theory is simple, blue emitters are very efficient, and constantly getting better, so shoot as many of them as you need to at a phosphor target that effectively acts as the "lens" of the downlight. As blue LEDs get brighter, Lightolier uses less of them or drives them more gently to produce a product that puts out the same amount and color of light, while simply using less power, from generation to generation. The same principle applies to making brighter versions as well (just keep the same number of LEDs and you get more lumens from the same power in).
Elumen, produces roadway and area lighting products, shared a bit on how their streelights have placed a lot of intelligence into the driver functions (driver = power conversion + control functions), to basically allow them to take whatever approach the market is most desiring. Ben Frank shared that as currently implemented, they use their built-in feedback mechanisms to maintain the overall lumen output within the prescribed range throughout the life of the product. As the LEDs output degrade on hot nights or over their many tens of thousands of lifetime hours, they tweak up the current, as needed, to maintain a constant light level. If the market is demanding longer life rather than constant output, they could just as easily allow lumen depreciation to a certain pre-set level before beginning the compensation, which tends to mess with the whole concept of L70 types of lighting design approaches. Plus with the intelligence built in, there are obviously a range of options in how to handle such things as "end of life" notfication, including shut-off, dim or later, "phone home". Right now, those aren't user programmable functions, but when one of the kick off speakers was Margaret Newman, Chief of Staff of the New York City Department of Transportation, is it just maybe possible that one of the largest streetlight consumers in the world shared some of their vision of what the market needs?
It's good to have those 3% willing to invest in the industry's knowledge base. More reports to follow, but don't expect all the details here... Long Beach will be the place to be.
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