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November 2, 2004...LED industry professionals met recently in San Diego, California USA. Our Sr. Technology Editor, Alan Thompson, attended and filed the following report:

This year’s Intertech LED conference was held in San Diego and was once again well attended. The weather was atypically rainy and cool, but there were no storm clouds on the horizon for the LED community. There was some concern about a general slowing of shipments and price declines, but these had been anticipated earlier this summer by participants at Blue 2004 in Taiwan and in subsequent news reports.

The most newsworthy impression garnered by this observer was the rapid increase in the number of companies offering high power LEDs. This category can be loosely defined as those LEDs dissipating 1W or more and emitting tens of lumens. Pioneered by Lumileds with their Luxeon line, who have addressed many emerging markets, followed by Osram and Toyoda-Gosei who have principally addressed the automotive arena, these devices are making steady inroads into specialty lighting. There have been anecdotal reports of limited availability and high prices, but this situation is about to change with increased competition from several companies. Cree, Cotco, Fore-Epi, and Seoul Semiconductor have all recently announced bright monochrome and white high power LEDs, while Rohm showed some very bright white LEDs at the conference. Expect other players to enter this category soon

The leadoff speaker was iSuppli’s Jagdish Rebello who gave us his predictions for the HB-LED market. After growth of 65% in 2003, he calculated revenues of $2.8B in 2004 (all numbers are US $ and are for packaged high brightness devices, being careful not to count bare die twice). He predicts a 19% CAGR through 2008 to $4.5B with an even faster increase for the high power segment to $1.6B in 2008. Major applications are backlighting of mobile appliance keypads and displays, followed by signage, automobiles and traffic signals. While the mobile handset market will be saturating in the near future, backlighting for larger displays and TVs, automobiles and specialty lighting will fuel this growth

A very interesting talk by Russell Sturm of the International Finance Corporation (a division of the World Bank) covered a large potential market that has been off the radar screens of most industry pundits. He explored the market at "the bottom of the pyramid", which is for lighting in the poorer part of the third world. One in three households worldwide use kerosene and other fuels for lighting. This is expensive (very poor luminous efficacy), unhealthy, and polluting. Bringing grid power to these populations is utterly beyond their government’s resources, but solar powered LED lights are a good solution. He showed examples of how this might be done and encouraged the audience to participate in this effort through partnering with local entrepreneurs and with financing from his organization

We heard another approach to cooperation from Tom Pearsall, who is the general secretary of EPIC (European Photonics Industry consortium). This group encourages keeping manufacturing in Europe by innovations in technology and developing markets through standards and roadmapping. There is a good lesson here for the US and other "developed" countries to look closely at the pitfalls of outsourcing high technology and the true costs of manufacturing, not just the higher cost of labor at home

We then heard presentations that covered very small displays (Microvision’s pioneering glasses mounted microdisplay) to very large signs and screens (Barco Media and Entertainment, Young Electric Sign Company). Samsung’s J-T Lim gave a comprehensive talk on backlighting LCD displays with LEDs, pointing out several advantages over fluorescents, particularly for TVs. Then it was on to high power LEDs, with presentations by Cree, Osram, Vishay, and Nichia (who had a copy of their little blue book for everyone). Steady progress was evident, with lab efficacys exceeding 100lum/W for colors. Major hurdles still include external efficiency, cost, packaging UV and high power LEDs and decreasing efficacy with higher drive currents. Eddie Effron, who recently joined Permlight, used his 30 years experience as a lighting designer to give us an excellent explanation of how to communicate with the lighting industry and understand their needs. Kevin Dowling of Color Kinetics showed us how far and where LEDs have penetrated the specialty lighting market

The last talks covered applications in aviation, rail, and marine markets, where LEDs enjoy many advantages but have to convince a conservative community of their feasibility. The main lesson here is to understand the environment and ensure adequate reliability of the entire fixture, not just the LEDs themselves. While these markets are not nearly as large as backlighting for cell phones, they provide opportunities where cost is secondary to performance and should be a great proving ground for general lighting as LED costs come down

So in spite of the inclement weather outside, the participants’ mood in San Diego was generally sunny as our LED industry continues its exciting progress toward new applications for solid state lighting. Stay tuned for more progress reports. And I invite your comments – we welcome all opinions and are happy to host guest editorials.

You can email Alan Thompson directly at "alant @ compoundsemi.com" (simply delete the " marks and spaces on each side of the "@" sign, which we add to discourage online address "harvesters.")

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