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Editorial:
Cellphones and Fairy Lights Brighten the Holidays
... We've all come to take things like cellphones and strings of miniature "fairy lights" for granted. They're almost a necessity in life, especially this time of year when we're buying the latest handsets as gifts and decorating our homes for the holidays with as many lights as the circuits...
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2012
SSL Summit Series keeps its focus to Smarter, Better Lighting
Launched in 2008, the SSL
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October's New York City meet really hit the target, and we're picking up the
pace for LA/Long Beach April 3-4, 2012. The Summit brings together key lighting
influencers with industry thought leaders, pioneers, and innovators from the
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Quality is the gate, the future is the focus...
Showcase participants and sponsors are vetted to separate
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Osram Introduces New Golden Dragon LEDsDecember 12, 2005...Osram Opto Semiconductor has introduced a new version of its Golden Dragon LEDs
boasting a dramatic increase in brightness and efficiency to be used as daytime
running lights. The LEDs use indium gallium nitride (ThinGaN) thin film chips
that the company credits with the 60% increase in brightness from the original
design of 40 lm to the new design at 64 lm. The company contends that the increased
brightness from the optimized package uses the same operating current of 500 mA.
However, the forward voltage is reduced from 3.8 V to 3.2 V.
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Quest for LED-Based Holiday Lighting
Scott McMahanDecember 9, 2005...At between double to quadruple the cost, LED-based holiday lighting may seem like a bad investment to uninformed consumers. They use less electricity, and are safer and more reliable than conventional fluorescent lighting. Although the lights have become available at some major stores, conventional holiday lighting totally dominates the shelves. At some stores the solid state alternatives may be difficult to find if they are there at all. If LED-based lights are not at the stores you go to that have conventional Christmas and holiday lighting, be sure to ask. They might be able to get some in time…
When I went to the closest Super Wal-Mart, I was not able to find any on the shelves. I asked the person who stocks the shelves who said, “Last year I think we had some, but this year I haven’t seen any…” I also took my quest to a grocery store that carries some department store items called HEB Plus. They had a large display of Christmas and holiday light sets, but no LED-based holiday lights were available. This is not what I expected after seeing lights at the same stores last year.
I brought the search to Target, another retail department store, and found their holiday and Christmas lighting section. I had to do a lot of searching within the section to find the small number of LED-based holiday lights on display. Some were multicolored, some red, some yellow, and some white. All of the LED Lights came from one manufacturer, Philips. This is actually a subsidiary of Royal Philips Electronics in the Netherlands. According to the box, the products were actually all manufactured in China. I went to one final store on my quest to find LED holiday lights. Loews, a home improvement and hardware store, had only a few boxes of LED holiday lights left. One was green, one was yellow, and a third was red. They were all made by USA company, G.E. While this was annoying, it was not indicative of all Austin stores or all Wal-Mart stores.
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Cree Leverages US Patent for White LEDs With Taiwan Company
LIGHTimes StaffDecember 8, 2005...Cree Leverages US Patent for White LEDs With Taiwan Company
LED manufacturer and innovator, Cree Inc. has again leveraged its white LED
patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,600,175)
to yet another manufacturer. Kingbright, a company that Cree calls a “strategic
LED chip customer” with headquarters in Taiwan, will be authorized to
manufacture and sell white LEDs incorporating Cree chips. The patent covers
a relatively fundamental part of white LED production describing a blue or UV-LED
packaged with a phosphor to ultimately produce white light. Kingbright, the
latest company to receive licensing under the ‘175 patent this year, will
be using the Cree LED chip products exclusively for their white LED product
offerings.
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Color Kinetics Technology Lights TV Studios
LIGHTimes StaffDecember 7, 2005...Color Kinetics, a pioneer in inteligent solid state lighting, has recently completed
installations of their controllable LED lighting systems in a number of major
television studios. The Tonight Show, CNN's Washington DC Newsroom and The Situation
Room, MTV Total Request Live, and The X Factor - one of the UK's top-watched entertainment
programs with an estimated 10 million viewers are among the latest adopters of
Color Kinetics technology.
These adopters are only some of the major television studios that have chosen
LED technology as an alternative for set lighting. In using white LEDs with
the technology, the users gain complete control over color temperature and reportedly
get much greater flexibility in choosing set lighting.
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Strategy Analytics Predicts Strong Growth in the LED Camera Flash Market
LIGHTimes StaffDecember 6, 2005...UK/USA-based market research firm, Strategy Analytics predicts that LED revenues for keypad and handset
backlighting applications will fall 41 percent over the next three years, according
to their latest report. The company sited the introduction of brighter and more
efficient LEDs and backlighting schemes, causing a net reduction in the average
number of LEDs required. Additionally the company predicts that the decline of
the average selling prices for LEDs and backlight modules for handsets and keypads
will contribute to the decline of revenue for the market segment.
However, Strategy Analytics predicts one strong growth segment of the LED market
for handsets, producing handset camera flashes. The company further predicts
that revenues from sales of LEDs for handset camera flashes will make up about
36 percent of the total LEDs-for-handsets market.
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Researchers Create Color Changing Fashions
Scott McMahanDecember 5, 2005...There may be hope in the future for those who find color coordinating a challenge.
In one of the more unusual applications for light emitting diodes that I have
ever heard of, researchers at Keio University have created a scarf that changes
color to match the wearer’s clothing. An article in Nekkei
News explained that if the wearer has on a blue shirt or jacket, the scarf
will turn blue. The device that the researchers hope will bridge the divide between
technology and fashion uses 100 optical fibers through which LED light is emitted.
The device incorporates a color sensor and an LED color controller. "We are
aiming to add new value to fashion items by blending IT technology into them,"
said Akira Wakita, leader of the research group and an assistant professor of
the university's Faculty of Environmental Information. The group has also created
a shirt that gradually changes color with changes in a person’s body temperature
from blue to red. Osram Boosts Efficiency of Power TopLEDs
LIGHTimes StaffDecember 2, 2005...Osram Opto Semiconductor says it has improved the efficiency of its Power TopLED
devices by up to 150% depending on the color. The company said their latest efficiency
improvement is the result of their new thin film structure which they claim directs
nearly all of the light emitted by the device through the top, virtually eliminating
light traveling in a useless direction. Power TopLEDs are now available in both
the previous brightness levels and the brighter versions in amber (617 nm), yellow
(590 nm), orange (606 nm), red (625 nm), and super red (633 nm). The orange power
toppled now comes in 3 lm and 7 lm versions. The 7 lm version operates at 50 mA.
The company said the improved efficiency comes as a result of the new structure
of their indium gallium aluminium phosphide (InGaAlP) thin films.
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Commentary & Perspective...
December 13, 2005...We've all come to take things like cellphones and strings of miniature "fairy
lights" for granted. They're almost a necessity in life, especially
this time of year when we're buying the latest handsets as gifts and decorating
our homes for the holidays with as many lights as the circuits can handle. As
far as the compound semi and solid state lighting industries are concerned,
handsets and fairy lights are the basic bread and butter end products that keep
many CS/SSL supply line companies afloat. Holiday sales of these end products
can mean the difference between profit or loss for 2005 company bottom lines.
As many of you know, I live in rural central Texas. We don't always see everything
you folks in big cities see, but what's really good and needed seems to eventually
filter its way out to us. Our ranch is between two small towns called Brady
and Brownwood. Little old Brady turns out to be where I noticed what turns out
to be one of the best new ideas in cellphones--Cingular's Firefly for
kids 8-12. And in our regional business center, Brownwood (which actually
got a Starbucks this year!) I was overjoyed to finally find LED-based holiday
fairy lights at our Wal-Mart Super Store. Wonders never cease.
For the 35 years I've been covering advanced semiconductor technologies, I'm
always amazed at what systems integrators eventually come up with when finally
integrating the core technologies the semiconductor industry creates. Those
end products are always more innovative than any of us originally imagined.
Looking back, ones that stand out include the fax machine, the PC, conventional
LEDs... you name it. Few of us who were in on early stage semiconductor technologies
could have accurately predicted the rich variety of end use products that would
eventually be produced and embraced by the general public.
Firefly Mobile is the name of the
company that produces the handset for kids 8-12. This isn't just a gimmick phone,
nor is it a toy. It appears to have the potential to be a very important (and
logically controllable) communication tool for families with children at
that age where they're just learning what it means to be independent and truly
responsible for themselves. I found out about Firefly from a big Cingular
billboard in Brady. In addition to the fact that I love fireflies, the look
on the little girl featured in the billboard is priceless. It's hard to ignore
a new billboard in Brady. (They so seldom change). Mobile Media reviewed
the product in case you want more information. My point in highlighting it here
is that it's our industries' technologies, like HBTs and HB LEDs, that make
new handset designs and advanced communications capability possible. It's only
this year that we could even get cellphone reception throughout most
of the Texas Hill Country, let lone a phone geared to provide the most important
age-bracket of our families (8-12) to be in instant touch with us when they're
beyond shouting distance. Whether or not you want to buy a Firefly for
your kid is up to you. The mere fact that that such a well-designed and well-marketed
product exists blows my mind.
Inliten and NOMA are the key names on the box of LED mini lights I recently
bought (in quantity) at the Brownwood Wal-Mart. Inliten LLC has a website,
but other than a nice basic design and framework, there isn't much information
on it. I learned quite a bit about NOMA, however, which was the oldest
and largest holiday lighting manufacturer in the USA for six decades. If interested,
you can read about NOMA's colorful history on an impressive collector's site
called OldChristmasLights.com.
In the early 1900s, NOMA originally stood for the National Outfit Manufacturer's
Association. Interestingly, and possibly foreboding of what may eventually
happen to our current SSL industry... the NOMA trade association was formed
around a core lighting patent. Inliten LLC is a current licensed user of the
old NOMA registered trademark which successfully branded "quality"
and "safety" into holiday lighting. But even then, Italian and Japanese
competitors who were able to sell cheaper product into the USA dominated the
market and NOMA was no more by the late 1960s. It's Chapter 11 reorg evidently
allowed it to collect licensing fees.
The Inliten website has no contact information for the company, but it is located
in Glenview, Illinois USA. If any of you supply to or know anyone at Inliten,
please forward this column on to them with my compliments on an extremely well-packaged
product. Packaged, as in boxed. I bought some in multi colors; some in all white.
They look fine and work fine. But it's the boxes that caught my attention. They're
a uniform bright blue and on the front it says in strong bullets: . Super
Safe . Long Life . Energy Saving. Nowhere does it say who makes the actual
LEDs, but then, consumers (except me, and hopefully you) could care less
about that. They'll see right away that they cost twice the price (about $10
per string of 50) of conventional fairy lights (priced at $3.50 for less lights
than the LEDs). But then you look at the bottom of the front cover of the box
and it notes "25,000 hour bulb life... break-resistant bulbs stay cool to
the touch..." and all the other features of conventional strings of mini
lights.
Then, the same bullets are repeated in more detail on the back of the box stating,
"LED lights transmit only light. Bulbs will not get hot no matter how long
they're left on. LED light sets last up to 25 times as long as standard mini
light sets. 50 light set uses only 2.4 watts of energy." Then they add an
easy to read (although not all that easy for the Wal-Mart shopper to understand)...
"Energy Cost Comparison" chart, which underscores that the LED set
uses 2.4 watts per set and costs only $0.94 in a "seasonal
usage" metric versus the set of conventional mini's that use 20.4 watts
per set and cost $7.93 in "seasonal usage". With household and business
electric bills going sky-high these days, it's no surprise the LED lights that
cost twice as much at purchase are selling quite nicely. Rural Texas consumers
can be very smart when it comes to saving energy.
So those are my holiday tips for this week. Brighten up your holidays by buying,
using... and encouraging others to buy and use... the end products that
our industry has slaved to make possible. It's only taken us 30 years for our
products to get designed into these overnight successes. Let the celebrating
begin! Happy Holidays, Everyone!! If you have questions about
the solid state lighting and compound semiconductor industries or
have
news or views to share, we want to hear from you! Feel free to contact
us anytime.
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