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Rubicon Gets $20 Million Contract to Supply Sapphire Wafers
CompoundSemi News Staff
February 13, 2012...Rubicon Technology, Inc. a provider of sapphire substrates and products announced that it has entered into a new contract with its unnamed largest customer for large-diameter sapphire wafers. The $20 million contract reportedly represents a baseline level of shipments that will be made from June through December 2012. Rubicon's previous contract with the company expired at the end of December.
“We are pleased that we will continue as a key supplier to our valued six-inch wafer customer in 2012,” said Raja Parvez, President and Chief Executive Officer of Rubicon. “...However, with LED chip capacity presently not fully utilized, the inflection point in demand for large-diameter sapphire wafers for LEDs is still some months in the future.”
Rubicon granted adjustments to fourth-quarter 2011 price and volume requirements under the expiring six-inch contract. Consequently, Rubicon’s revenue for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2011, was between $19 and $20 million, slightly below its previous guidance of $20 to $23 million.
Aixtron and Minsheng Financial Leasing to Offer Leasing of Aixtron MOCVD Systems in China
LIGHTimes News Staff
February 9, 2012...Minsheng Financial Leasing Co., Ltd. (MSFL), China’s main non-banking financial institution, and Aixtron SE of Germany announced a strategic alliance for joint marketing of leasing options for Aixtron's MOCVD systems in China. The new agreement defines the strategic cooperation between the two parties to promote the distribution of Aixtron´s MOCVD equipment to customers across China with the aid of MSFL’s financial services. Mr. Feng Wang, (CPO, President of Finance Leases SBU MSFL) and Wolfgang Breme (CFO Aixtron) signed the Memorandum of Understanding at a ceremony held at MSFL’s headquarters in Beijing. “This exciting strategic cooperation will enable LED manufacturers to draw upon the most appropriate financing opportunities for the acquisition of key-enabling MOCVD equipment,” commented Ms. Rong Wang, CFO of MSFL. “Due to temporary restrictions in China in the availability of financing, this news is expected to be received very positively.” LIGHTimes SecondPage members login for more. Guests can view membership details.
LG Chem Begins Mass Production of 45 lm/W OLED Panels
LIGHTimes News Staff
February 9, 2012...LG Chem, reports that it is mass producing a 45 lm/W 100mm x 100mm OLED panel. The company utilizes the Universal Display's OLED material and technology in the LG-OLED-41 device, which emits some 3,000 nits for the 90mm by 90mm active area. The OLED panel is 2.44 mm thick (including the optical film and PCB, and 1.84 mm thick by itself. The company claims that the LG-OLED-41 has a lifetime of 10,000 hours.
LG Chem plans to begin mass producing the second generation of its OLED panels in the Q2 of 2012. These will reportedly have an efficacy of 60 lm/W and a lifetime of 60,000 hours.
The company seems on track to meet it previously published OLED roadmap in which the company hopes to gradually increase the size and efficacy of its OLEDs through 2015, producing a 200mm x 200mm 135 lm/W panel with an LT70 of 40,000 hours.
Design LED Releases Latest Flexible LED Screen
LIGHTimes News Staff
February 9, 2012...DesignLED of China Released P 6mm Flexible LED Screen. The P 6mm Flex LED Screen is to be used for many applications, such as TV studio , fashion show auto show , and concert tours. The led screen measure 288mmx 192mm per tile, full magnetic backside system for rental, also screw for fixed installation for easy mounting on any metal sheet, and rubber-based louvers to weaken gaps between tiles and backside design makes product sexy in structure . It has around 3000nits brightness and 2400Hz refresh rate for vivid color and excellent effect before camera.
The company says that the P 6mm Flex could make an led screen as big as possible without any size limits. Compared to P 10mm Flex , P 6mm is the mainstream product, and will have more demands from market which has much more comprehensive applications for high-end market.
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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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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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