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Epistar Qualifies Veeco K465i MOCVD System for LED Production Ramp
CompoundSemi News Staff
May 21, 2010...Veeco of Plainview, New York USA, reports that Epistar Corporation of Taiwan will soon be ramping production of LEDs using its newly qualified TurboDisc K465i MOCVD system from Veeco.
The K465i boasts superior wavelength uniformity, excellent run-to-run repeatability, and high capital efficiency in terms of the number of good wafers per day for each capital dollar. According to Veeco, the K465i can be easily tuned and optimized on wafer sizes up to 8 inches. After mainteance, Veeco says that the system enables a fast tool recovery time.
Dr. M.J. Jou, President of Epistar, commented, “Ramping to production quickly and maintaining high throughput is critical to our success. Veeco enabled us to qualify the K465i rapidly and it provides the automation required to produce highly uniform LEDs with minimal downtime. The K465i provides Epistar the ease-of-use and system availability to meet our growing production requirements.”
Bill Miller, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, General Manager of Veeco's MOCVD Operations said, “As a result of this successful qualification, we currently expect to ship a significant number of tools to Epistar this year. We are excited that we have been chosen to support their volume capacity ramp in 2010. This is an important milestone for Veeco as we continue to build our Taiwan installed base.”
Nichia Settles Patent Lawsuit with Jiawei
LIGHTimes News Staff
May 20, 2010...Nichia reports that it and Jiawei and Jiawei's subsidiaries have been able to amicably resolve their differences. Under the settlement, JIAWEI will make a payment to NICHIA as a part of NICHIAs legal fees and also agree to enter into a business arrangement.
Nichia filed the lawsuit in November 2009 in the Eastern District of Texas alleging that certain white LED-application products marketed Jiawei and its international corporate subsidiaries contain patent infringing white LEDs (Ref: Coverage). The Jiawei subsidiaries including Shenzhen Jiawei Industries Co. Ltd., a Chinese corporation, Jiawei Technology (HK) Ltd., a Hong Kong corporation, and Jiawei North America Inc., a Canadian corporation (collectively known as “Jiawei”). produce LED application products containing white LEDs purchased from MLS Electronics Co., Ltd. (Zhongshan, PRC). It is Nichia's assertion in the lawsuit that these white LEDs infringe Nichia's United States patents.
As part of the lawsuit, Nichia sought damages and an injunction against further infringement. NICHIA claimed that the products infringe three NICHIA patents directed to white LEDs (U.S. Patent Nos. 5,998,925, 7,026,756 and 7,531,960) and a patent directed to LED chips (U.S. Patent No. 6,870,191).
Sharp to Start Mass Production of Blue LED Chips at Its Fukuyama Plant
LIGHTimes News Staff
May 20, 2010...Sharp Corporation of Japan announced that it will start mass production of blue LED chips at its 15 billion yen Fukuyama Plant in Fukuyama City, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan within 2010. The blue LED chip production at the Fukuyama City plant will add to the blue chip production that the company began in January 2010 at its Mihara City plant. Sharp says that the additional production from the Fukuyama plant will boost its total production capacity of blue LED chips to approximately five billion units a year in fiscal 2011. Sharp’s blue LED chip production business at the Fukuyama Plant has been adopted as a project under the “Fiscal 2009 subsidy scheme for promoting the location of low-carbon industry and creating employment” run by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
Strategy Analytics Predicts LED Market Explosion Will be Hampered by Materials Shortage
LIGHTimes News Staff
May 18, 2010...Strategy Analytics predicts that
the fast-growing market for high-brightness LEDs in LCD TVs will be restricted by a shortage of key semiconductor materials in the second half of 2010. This prediction is the focus of the company's report “Materials Shortage to Restrict Rampant LED Market.”
Strategy Analytics (SA) points out that demand has soared with the rapid penetration of LED backlighting modules in LCD TVs. This has also lead to a soaring demand for capital equipment, especially metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) reactors used to make gallium nitride (GaN) LEDs.
SA says that a similar trend is now evident in the supply of consumables, specifically the metal-organic material trimethylgallium (TMG) and sapphire wafers. SA contends that demand for TMG already exceeds the available supply; therefore manufacturers need to absorb a 20% price increase in the near term. The company also predicts that a shortage of sapphire wafers, upon which most blue and white LEDs are produced, is also likely in the second half of 2010.
“Concerns have previously been raised over the ability of MOCVD equipment vendors to meet rapidly increasing demand,” noted Asif Anwar, director of the GaAs and Compound Semiconductor Service at Strategy Analytics. “The concern for short supply of materials will create a bottleneck for LED market growth over the short term.”
The Strategy Analytics contends that Taiwanese LED manufacturers in particular need to adjust to the new reality of the supply chain. Historically, they have bargained for the price of these key materials. However, according to the SA's assertion, the balance of power in the LED industry has changed, with competitors backed by huge corporations, such as Samsung and LG, much better positioned to absorb higher material costs and to guarantee their supply in a constrained market.
Steven Entwistle, VP of the Strategy Analytics Strategic Technologies Practice, added, “Capacity expansions already in progress should relieve these constraints by mid-2011. Until then, the average selling price of high-brightness LEDs based on gallium nitride should hold up well.”
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LED Lighting Looking Better at Lightfair
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
May 17, 2010...Lightfair, the USA's largest annual lighting-focused gathering, is always a good checkpoint for progress in the LED lighting front. There are never any real technological surprises, since progress in this field is fast-paced, but still incremental, as it is in any semiconductor-driven arena. In fact, if anyone is claiming something revolutionary, just plan to smile, nod and find someone who really knows about the technology to help debunk the over-zealous claims. But Lightfair does provide a realistic perspective when you see it all at once, and all in one place. Here are some highlights (likely part 1 of 2) that struck us during our wanderings.
Whose LEDs? Whose driver?... With solid state lighting providing a perfect opportunity for producing junk, vapor or smoke and mirrors (it's important that the two are combined for the most spectacular effect), the industry has done a good job of propagating the "Ten questions to ask your luminaire supplier" kind of message. Leading among those has been a consistent urging to ask who the LED supplier is. If you are starting with something that isn't "lighting capable" there is no way to compensate to save the overall system reliability or performance. As we've written recently, with the number of quality lighting-class LED suppliers currently out there, and the complete tools and data they are offering to help designers assess performance and reliability for their designs, LEDs aren't the weak link in the chain anymore. So where is the next progress point? Consensus seems to be that the drivers, including power supplies if needed for a particular design, are where we need to focus the next "What's inside?" line of questioning.
The call to action here was generated by a good talk with NXP Semiconductors, who took the technical innovation award from the IALD/IES judging committee. I was immediately struck with the question of whether a group of lighting experts were qualified to analyze the intricacies of a digital/analog power control device. As I was heading towards the high-horse, it occurred to me that a more valid question might be, "What did they think they saw that impressed a bunch of 'bulbheads' with a chip's technical innovation?" NXP was pretty sure that it came down to efficiency and dimming. Efficiency is a functional necessity, since the 2102 model is targeted towards the replacement lamp market, and any inefficiency becomes waste heat, and that's the last thing you need more of in an already constrained package. Dimming critical from the marketing side, since "LED lightbulb" buyers will largely expect their bulbs to be dimmable, and it's an area that continues to need work. NXP has done good work in both areas, with good efficiency and dimming down to 1% that is tuned to be linear to the eye, without pop-on. Based on data from the 10M+ units shipped for the 2101 predecessor, which handles up to 8W in a replacement bulb, and 15W for designs with more room, they're pegging the lifetime to be at least 75,000 hours at 150-degrees C (that be hot). The 2102 supports 15W/25W respecitively for the same applications, with a power factor of better than .9 so it won't be a hinderance to Energy Star designs. Sounds like one solution to that weak link.
If we're calling this Day 1 of the "whose driver" movement, we can't expect everyone to know the answer off the top of their head, so a little patience might be required while this catches some traction. If a luminaire or light-engine sales person doesn't know the answer, give them a chance to find out. Of course, there's that other detail of figuring out what the answer means. No sweat... that's the driver suppliers' task to start those marketing engines up to get us all educated on what we're looking for in a "lighting class" driver, and what the warning flags of shoddy solutions might be. (Gee, gives me an idea for some future commentaries... I love when that happens.) We'll also do our best to keep from steering this information car into the technical weeds, hopefully keeping it at a level useful to the luminaire folks and decision makers alike).
Here come the Japanese... Whoo-hoo! Last year's Lightfair was notable because "the big guys" in lighting showed up, including Philips newly acquired US brands, so the follow on to that story seems natural, it's time to shake some more stuff up. And shake it was. Japan (and Korea) are arriving to the party, and they aren't late. It probably hasn't escaped many peoples' notice that flat panel TVs, along with desktop monitors and laptop displays, are moving to LEDs. Some predictions are that here in 2010, LED backlighting will achieve nearly 100% market penetration on the new models of laptop computers, as it did a few years ago for PDAs and cell phones. For the TVs, the pace is somewhat slower, but no less impressive in scope, with predictions that the uptick in LED demand driven by the adoption will actually lead to a bit of a materials shortage for a few years starting in 2011/2012. (Not to worry, the market sees it coming, and the shortage could be brief, if it occurs at all, and will probably lead to an oversupply shortly thereafter... cycles anyone, cycles?).
So what's this mean? Well, flat panel suppliers have put 2 and 2 together and come up with the answer, "Let's get serious about building our own LEDs for this stuff, and since we're at it, how about we build them for the lighting market as well... And what the heck, let's build the lights too)." Oh my, that's a lot of volume capacity ramping up, and volume cut costs. If you can build your own LEDs (not for amateurs, and get excited about billion-dollar levels of infrastructure investment), you can sell LED lighting solutions at very competitive prices. Panasonic and Samsung have made their intentions known, including the January announcement of Samsung's strategic relationship wtih Acuity.
We had the chance to spend some time with both Toshiba and Sharp during the week, and it's clear that they are extremely serious. Sharp is imminent with its first US offerings, and has already shipped something around 1.5M LED "lightbulbs", A-lamp style, in Japan. They're bringing their consumer marketing focus to bear on the commercial/industrial targets, as well as planning to offer a range of luminaires, beyond just replacement lamps.
Between the two, Toshiba appears ahead in this race across the Pacific and is humbly boasting 32 replacement lamp product SKUs in stock today (that's a novel announcement... not smoke or mirrors, but showing the actual fire). Their approach is to tap into their existing US commercial/industrial infrastructure, Toshiba International Corporation (TIC) which has distribution and rep relationships through its variable speed motors (for HVAC systems) and other product lines. Lighting is new to this part of the corporation, but plenty of the new team has experience, and it brings a heck of a lot of manufacturing and logistic capabilities right out of the chute. Their also isn't a lack of corporate knowledge, with Toshiba bringing 120 years of lighting experience to the table (their first lighting products followed meetings with the Thomas Edison... no joke). They currently ship about $2B/year of lighting products, and are putting about 500,000 LED replacement lamps out the door monthly in Japan. This ought to be interesting.
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