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Cambridge University LEDs on Silicon to be Exploited by Plessey with Newly Purchased Cambridge Spin-off
LIGHTimes News Staff
February 7, 2012...Plessey, a semiconductor maker of Plymouth, UK will be utilizing a process developed at Cambridge University to grow gallium nitride on silicon crystals for LEDs. The company hopes to use the technique to reduce the cost of making LEDs for lighting in offices and homes. In other news Plessey announced the purchase of the Cambridge University spin-off, CamGaN Ltd. to utilize the spin-off's GaN-on-silicon growth technology for the production of white LEDs.
Cost has been a significant barrier to the adoption of LED lighting. LEDs have been relatively expensive to produce, mainly because, historically, the gallium nitride crystals used in LEDs could only be grown on sapphire. Researchers around the world including companies such as Osram and Bridgelux have been racing to find an effective technique for growing GaN on silicon instead, which would drive down production costs.
Professor Sir Colin Humphreys at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge, who founded the spin-off CamGaN with the technology, has developed an effective method. Plessey, which purchased the spin-off will reportedly commercialize the technique in a new arm of Plessey called Plessey Lighting. Plessy Lighting plans to initially make LEDs on silicon for external manufacturers, but eventually the company hopes to develop its own LED lamps in-house.
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Cree Releases XT-E LED Platform Which Halves Cost Per Lumen
LIGHTimes News Staff
February 7, 2012...
The cool white versions of the XT-E (5000K-10,000K) average about 70 CRI with no minimum CRI. The (3500K-5000K) neutral white XTE typically has a 75 CRI. The neutral white XTE can also come with a minimums of either 70 or 80 CRI. The warm white (2700K to 3500K) XTE has a typical CRI of 80 and can also have a minimum CRI of 70 or 80. The XT-E can be driven at up to 1500mA at 2.85 V if a designer would like to maximize lumen output.
Cree says that the XT-E LED and the recently released XB-D LED represent a dramatic transformation in LED price and performance. Cree asserts that the XT-E addresses the largest obstacle to mass LED lighting adoption, initial cost, and enables LED lighting systems to replace their less efficient ancestors.
In addition to having extremely high brightness, the XT-E uses the relatively small 3.45 mm x 3.45 mm XP footprint. The high performance and small footprint allow light fixtures to use fewer LEDs to produce the same light output. This further reduces the cost per lumen in arrays and LED lamps and fixtures. In fact the company claims that the XT-E reduces the number of required LEDs by two to three times depending upon the layout.
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Cree, Inc. announced its XT-E White LED, which the company says delivers twice the lumens-per-dollar of other LEDs and boasts the highest performance and efficacy in the industry. The company has chosen the approach of using silicon carbide to gain the performance needed.
While silicon carbide is more expensive a material than silicon, Cree contends that its use of silicon carbide along with its XT-E LED technology ultimately reduces the cost per lumen output of LEDs with its extremely high efficacy of 162 lm/W (LPW) of a 6000K LED at 350 mA and 25 degrees C and 148 LPW of a 6000 K LED at 350 mA at 85 degrees C. A 3000K XT-E has an efficacy of 114 LPW at 85 degrees C. The LED comes in 2700K, 3000K, 4000K, 5000K and 6000K versions. The XT-E has a 115 degree viewing angle.
Epistar Chooses Veeco’s K465i MOCVD System for Development of LEDs on Silicon Wafers; SemiLEDs Qualifies K465i MOCVD System for LED Production
LIGHTimes News Staff
February 7, 2012...Veeco Instruments Inc. reports that Epistar Corporation, headquartered in Taiwan, recently selected the K465iTM TurboDisc® gallium nitride (GaN) Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) System for development of LEDs grown on silicon substrates.
Veeco also reports that SemiLEDs recently qualified the TurboDisc® K465i™ gallium nitride (GaN) Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) System for high-volume production of high brightness light emitting diodes (LEDs) at its state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Taiwan.
M. J. Jou, Ph.D., President of Epistar, commented, “We are pleased to choose Veeco’s K465i as our GaN-on-Si development tool. We are excited about the potential of GaN-on-Si technology as we move to larger wafer sizes. We appreciate the strong support from Veeco, and look forward to this collaboration.”
Chuong A. Tran, Ph.D., President, Chief Operating Officer, of SemiLEDs commented, “We have placed Veeco’s K465i system into our production facility in Taiwan. In addition to their proven MOCVD technology, Veeco’s commitment to providing best-in-class LED manufacturing equipment, as well as enhanced local support with their technology center in Hsinchu, makes the selection of Veeco as our vendor a logical choice.”
Corning and Samsung Corning Precision Materials Renew Agreements for Production of Specialty Glass for LED Backlit and OLED Displays
LIGHTimes News Staff
February 7, 2012...Corning Incorporated, Samsung Corning Precision Materials Co., Ltd. (SCPM), and the AMLCD division of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (SEC) renewed, for five more years, the two main agreements for their businesses. This license agreement was effective beginning in January, 2012. It continues the 17-year agreement with Samsung Corning Precision Materials position as a leading supplier of glass substrates to Korea’s OLED based and LCD displays . Samsung Corning Precision Materials is a highly successful equity company formed by Corning and Samsung in 1995.
Also effective in January, SCP and SEC signed a five-year renewal of SCP’s long term supply agreement with SEC. Samsung Corning Precision Materials is the majority supplier of the award-winning Corning EAGLE XG® glass to SEC. Samsung Corning Precision Materials also supplies LCD substrates to other display manufacturers in Korea.
SCPM also supplies Samsung Lotus Glass, a flexible glass material that allows the design of devices such as smartphones with curved screens. The glass will also be used in larger display such as OLED TVs. SCPM also makes Gorilla Glass which is widely employed in smartphones, tablets, and some new notebooks.
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Novaled Receives ISO 9001 Certification
LIGHTimes News Staff
February 2, 2012...Novaled AG, a developer and producer of OLED technology and materials based in Dresden, Germany has been certified according to the ISO 9001:2008 international quality management standard since January 2012. Working closely with external auditors, the company successfully completed the rigorous procedure certifying Novaled’s effective quality management system.
Novaled, reportedly passed the DQS certification audit with flying colors. External auditors from DQS GmbH (the German agency in charge of certifying management systems) reviewed all of the company’s quality-related aspects as to compliance with the ISO 9001:2008 international quality management standard over the course of several days.
“Novaled AG has demonstrated an effective quality management system with high internal and external quality standards,” noted Thomas John, DQS GmbH auditor. “This is also reflected in the company’s high level of customer satisfaction, a fact we were able to determine during our certification process.”
Novaled says that it has already been following the EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) Business Excellence Model for many years. Furthermore the company says that its entire team works continuously toward the highest quality of products, processes and the company as a whole. According to Novaled, these efforts led to the company being able to successfully demonstrate an extremely high level of quality during an external assessment conducted throughout Europe in January 2011. The company received the “Recognized for Excellence” award with a 5-star rating – an achievement which only few companies are able to reach.
“Global quality is at the center of our company strategy," says Jana Thiel Novaled quality manager. “This ISO 9001 certification brings an international recognition of our quality standard. Novaled teams are fully committed to reach highest level of excellence."
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LED Industry Buzzing at Strategies in Light
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
February 9, 2012...The leading annual US exhibition and conference for the broader LED industry supply chain, Strategies in Light, took place this week, and there is no doubt we're seeing a lively industry. Revenue growth at the packaged LED industry has been moderated a bit by the overall economic climate, but with most segments growing simply because LED-based solutions make sense, the overall picture is good and should continue that way. Here are some of the highlights that struck us, both in and around the event:
Is 2012 the year of the light engine?... A 'point of order' we're not shy about sharing is that lighting is already a fully-established industry, with fully-established channels, and upstart "chip-head" companies aren't necessarily going to be able to waltz right into the world of replacement lamps and luminaires without expecting more than a little market fight. Just a small step back from the luminaires are the different light-engine approaches, that provide a good opportunity for LED-based innovation, without the substantial channel challenges that arise at the level of full integration. We had the chance to hear from several companies that are making a good showing as "enablers" to the hundreds and hundreds of specialized luminaire manufacturers that may not have the resources to create an LED lighting design from scratch.
First up was Xicato, which has been making a name for itself with a color-consistency message that it has taken straight to the lighting decision makers, in hopes of setting a high-bar for any competitors to deal with. By combining a 'just barely' remote phosphor approach with thermal management that include cooling that phosphor plate, they are able to deliver modules that hit a 1.2 MacAdam ellipse target, and stay there for the life of the product. Not only does that suggest a luminaire incorporating that engine will be delivering essentially the same light 5+ years from now, but that subsequent versions spec'd at the same color temperature and CRI will match the originals despite their difference in ages.
While doing a good job of defining "color quality", they aren't going to be left alone in the space. Terralux is also after a piece of the market with its own innovations aimed at assuring an ultra-long lifetime. Their magic includes integrated thermal monitoring that compares the LED array operating parameters with the LM-80 data curves, so that operations are maintained within the "known" operating envelope at all times. Lumenetix, a name new to me, was also on hand showing its Araya family of dynamically-tuned white light engines. Able to vary their CCT from 2700K to 6000K, the design allows the users to tailor the light to suit the specific subject being lit, whether it's a painting or retail display, to achieve the desired effect. In a serious piece of fancy, they demonstrated a CCT copy-and-paste procedure that is a simple as aiming the remote control at one source (whatever it may be), capturing the observed CCT, and then "pasting" the same CCT to another luminaire. The luminaire has bi-directional communication with the remote in which the remote verifies the CCT by observation, rather than simply trusting that the luminaire hit the target. If it's not a perfect match, the remote provides the coordinate direction and magnitude "suggestions" for the luminaire to finish the tweaking process. Three very different, and productive approaches chasing what is currently a $1.9B module market opportunity, and which is projected to approach $6B towards the end of the decade.
Planar and power... In a sideline visit, we spent a few minutes with Eran Fine, CEO of Israel-based Oree, for an update on their planar LED technology. For those not familiar with Oree's approach, imagine something about the size and thickness of a playing card, that glows with a bright, uniform white light from one side. Personally, I've called it the "white OLED killer" as it provides a simple answer to the standard 'point source' LED challenge, and delivers the ultra-thin form factor with 85 lm/watt efficiency, all at 1/15th the price of an OLED solution. Color tunability is also part of the demonstrated capabilities, and overall, it's out of the box thinking, and well-supported by strategic industry investor-partners. It looks like what many of us imagined early-on as one "futuristic" approach to lighting that LEDs enable.
At the other end of the technology spectrum, Soraa shared some additional detail on its technology launch into the replacement lamp space. CEO Eric Kim outlined the gist of their innovation, which is simply making use of correctly polarized pure GaN substrates, allowing them to operate with incredible power densities within the LED structure. Not to get too techie, but while "normal" LEDs get brighter as you drive more current through them, they also lose efficiency. We call it "the droop problem", and if it went away, we could get a lot more lumens out of much smaller LEDs. The Soraa design, arrived at in no small part through a few decades of Shuji Nakamura's and Steve Denbaar's research, pushes 250 amps per square centimeter through it while still maintaining 90% of the starting efficiency. Now to get a little too techie, think about that for a second... if we assume 10 watts are doing the job of making the equivalent light of a 50W halogen, we're probably dealing with 3.3A at an LED-standard 3V. 3.3 into 250 is .013, which suggests the LED itself may only be 1/100th of a square centimeter. Even if some of my speculations are off by a factor of 2, 1/50th of a square centimeter is still reallly-really small. Talk about a point source! If the chunk of GaN you use to make the LED is small enough, you can get a bunch more of them from one expensive wafer, which makes each one relatively cheap. It's also a dream come true for the optics designer, since a smaller source suggests you can use a smaller optic to get a desired beam pattern. Soraa tells me that they're a few thousand hours into testing, with good results that are backing up their lifetime predictions. More data is needed to know that they've got the full package here, but things look good for this to be one of those noticeable breakthroughs that make the science of semiconductors interesting.
A vision for the future... Awareness seems to be building that now that LEDs are able to begin economically serving a number of areas in lighting, we can afford to expand our vision beyond just replacing the current lighting out there, to instead beginning to see where this could all go. Much as optical communications gave life to a whole new, and really-really big thing called "e-commerce", the fundamental technology of solid state light opens the door to "apps" none of us had previously imagined. For lack of a better term, lets call it "adaptive, responsive, interactive lighting". In a reception hosted by Light Based Technologies, the execs there did a good job of summarizing a concept of "personalizing" light by accepting inputs at a level of granularity relevant to an individual "user" and then responding at that same user level. Communicating information back up the hierarchy, for instance to that section, of that floor, of that building, on that grid, can allow those progressively larger functional blocks to take those conditions at the user level into account in "the big picture" of energy and environmental management. It can start to get very abstract, very quickly, but if we acknowledge that our health, happiness and productivity can all be influenced by light, and that now we finally have the technology that enables us to control it with unprecedented precision, we're off on a hunt to truly understand it. The discussion has just begun, and I, for one, look forward to "the more" that we'll uncover in the process.
The SSL Summit, April 3-4 in Long Beach California, is all about the future of better, smarter lighting. Make your plans now to join key visionaries who will engage, and help shape, the future of lighting. Visit www.SSLsummit.com for more information.
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