Lightimes Online News and Resources for the LED and Solid State Lighting Industry and its Supply Chain

January 17, 2006...One of the great annual pleasures of each New Year is promoting our industry's kickoff event, Strategies Unlimited's Strategies In Light (SIL) conference in California. Whereas our publishing and events company, CompoundSemi Online Inc. proudly hosts the key Asian gathering specifically for the solid state lighting (SSL) supply line in Taiwan each spring, the Solid State Lighting Suppliers Forum, SSLS for short, (the event formerly known as "Blue" now in its fourth year) PennWell's Strategies Unlimited proudly hosts Strategies In Light just after the first of each year during the winter in the USA.

Strategies In Light is the longest running international forum for those presenting current commercial developments in the entire high-brightness (HB) LED field. Now celebrating its 7th year, SIL will be held Feb. 15-17 in San Francisco at the famed Hilton Hotel in downtown San Francisco, which is just off Union Square.

Although it's now getting to be a rather large affair, this truly premier HB LED industry event still provides terrific personal networking opportunities for component and equipment supplier, and HB LED die and device packagers, as well as systems integrators of state of the art HB LED devices. SIL is also where you're always guaranteed the hot new HB LED market research facts and figures straight from the master market researcher himself, Dr. Robert S. (Bob) Steele. Bob will again provide his updated five-year industry HB LED forecast. And remember... to date, he's always been either right on, or never very far off! If you haven't yet made reservations to attend, SIL is only four weeks away, so get packing! Click this agenda link to see topics and speakers, or the pdf of the brochure and click this link to register online.

The conference theme Strategies Unlimited has chosen for this year is: Beyond Mobile Phones: Meeting the Challenges of a Changing LED Market. Focus will be on the the entire spectrum of current application trends in the areas of Illumination applications, automotive lighting (including headlamps), backlights for large LCD displays, LED video screens, aircraft lighting, supply trends in Asia, and new system level LED technologies. SIL will also conduct two timely workshops on Day 1, Feb. 15th. Topic titles are: Trends in Precision Measurements of LED Optical Properties as the first session all morning, and Real World Lighting: How LEDs Can Provide Cost-Effective Solutions for Today's Lighting Requirements in the afternoon session. The morning session caught my eye especially, because our industries definitely need to better understand the need for solid metrics if we're to gain solid respect from the well-established general lighting industry. Leading that workshop will be Alex Fong, VP of Optronic Laboratories.

The afternoon workshop, which looks like it could shape up to be a solid Reality Check, looks like great fun and will be led by four lighting experts, including Keith Scott from Lumileds. It could shape up to include opportunities for important dialog. Following the workshops, the main events get underway with the opening of exhibits at 5p with a welcome reception (and food!) until 8p. The reception is hosted by SIL sponsors Intematix and Dow Corning. The main conference sessions start first thing Thursday and run through Friday afternoon. Sponsor of the big Thursday evening networking reception is Veeco.

When chatting with Bob Steele about the featured speakers he has slated, names that caught my attention as excellent draws, plus being additions/changes to the original agenda, included Hans Nikol, VP of Philips Lighting and Mr. Chung H. Lee, president/CEO of Seoul Semiconductor in Korea. Other speakers of special note include B.J. Lee, president of Epistar who will report on the status of the industry in Taiwan, Masaru Sasaki of Koito Manufacturing who will talk about automotive lighting trends in Japan, and X. Gordon Liu, president/CEO of Xiamen Powerstar who is slated to report on trends in China.

Two financial experts will be there: analyst Jed Dorshimer of Cannacord Adams Research will talk about IP issues, which continues to be an especially important topic (although we'd all like those "issues" to simply go away), and Pete Moran of Doll Capital Management who will provide a venture capitalist's perspective on emerging growth opportunities. Everyone always wants to know where VC are coming from (and scouting for) these days!

All in all, this year's Strategies In Light conference looks like another winner. According to Strategies Unlimited's Tim Carli (whom you can contact for any additional information you may need at +1-650-941-3438, ext. 23 or by emailing tcarli@strategies-u.com), they expect 450 to 500 attendees and can easily accommodate that many having moved the meet from "The Peninsula" to the Hilton in downtown San Francisco.

Our intrepid news editor for both CompoundSemi News and LIGHTimes, Scott McMahan, will be on hand to report directly from SIL and in his series of follow-up reports when he returns from the California meet to Texas. Corner him and get to know him! He'll be easy to spot as he's quite tall (and good looking), dark hair, 30 something and looking like an obvious member of the "Fourth Estate". Our president/CEO, Tom Griffiths, will be there too (also good looking, of course, and probably he'll be manning the booth at the exhibit) in case you'd like to do a bit of business with CompoundSemi Online and Solid State Lighting Net or if you'd like to know a bit more about our SSLS 2006 meet May 9-11 in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

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