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LEDz Inc. Signs Deal with Gener8Xion
SSLDesign News Staff
November 21, 2006...LEDz Inc. of Burbank, California signed a distribution agreement with Gener8Xion, a media company involved in film and TV production, distribution, sales, and rentals of film and video equipment. Gener8Xion will add LEDz’ “LED Mini Par” daylight and tungsten lighting system. LEDz, Inc. has reportedly developed proprietary LED lighting products for movie, broadcast, and worship service applications (churches, temples, synagogues, etc…) that are innovative, affordable and user friendly. Romina Malek, President of Cinemills, stated, "LED technology is changing the face of the entertainment lighting market. The lights are more energy efficient, compact and becoming more accessible to industry technicians." The LED Mini Par light boasts interchangeable lenses, a choice of beam angles, compact design, a 60,000 hour life span, and low power consumption. LEDz Inc. News Release
Lamina Ceramics Gets Distributor for its Power LED Light Engine Products
LIGHTimes Staff
November 17, 2006...Lamina Ceramics reports that it has signed a distribution agreement with the Lighting Group of Arrow North American Components (NAC), a business unit of Arrow Electronics Inc. Under the terms of the agreement, Arrow will distribute Lamina’s high brightness LED arrays throughout North America. Additionally lighting customers will have access to Arrow’s regional lighting specialists and Lamina’s power LED light engine products. Lamina pointed out that Arrow’s Lighting Group employs regional lighting specialists and lighting applications engineers. Arrow’s Lighting Group provides full system solutions support for optical, thermal, and control electronic designs.
"Lamina Ceramics is the leading provider of high brightness LED light engines," said David McConaghy, Lamina's vice president of sales. "The new Atlas and Titan products have set the standard for total brightness, efficiency and cost. Lamina's LED light engines meet the needs of lighting designers by giving them the high brightness they need and the consistent white color that they have come to expect from traditional lighting sources, and are the easiest to integrate into lighting fixtures. The Titan, for example, does not require any soldering; just plug and play. The addition of Arrow Electronics to our sales channel will allow us to increase our support level to customers and take advantage of the wide variety of supporting products that Arrow offers." Company News Release
Seoul Semiconductor Begins Mass Production of AC LED Light Source, Acriche
LIGHTimes Staff
November 17, 2006...Seoul Semiconductor, a leading LED producer based in Korea, reported that it has begun mass producing its new lighting source, Acriche. It can be directly connected to 110 volt or 220 volt AC outlets using a simple circuit. According to the company it eliminates the need for a DC converter. The company points out that conventional LED products only work with DC power in AC outlets. The light engine uses Seoul Semiconductor’s patented packaging process and chip. The company says the it has more than 100 registered and applied-for patents related to the chip in various countries.
Acriche lasts an estimated 30,000 hours before its light output decreases to 75 percent of its original light output. The company says that conventional incandescent lamps last about 1,000 hours, halogen lamps have a lifespan of about 3,000 hours, and fluorescent lamps last about 8,000 hours. The company also says that it uses only about one-fourth of the electricity of incandescent bulbs and 40 percent less than fluorescent lamps. To give you an idea of how much energy could be saved, the company explained that if all the lighting in Korea alone by 2010, then the country will have saved 60 billion kWh. This is the output of a full sized nuclear power plant, and enough to save 6 million tons of CO2 emissions per year.
Seoul Semiconductor contends that the development of Acriche will accelerate the adoption of LED lighting for general lighting applications. The company predicts that Acriche sales will likely reach 20 billion Korean won by 2007 (about USD $21.4 million), 100 billion in 2008 (about USD $107 million) and 300 billion in 2009 (approximately USD $ 321 million). Current models of Acriche operate at about 40 lm/watt, however the company says that it expects to have an 80 lm/watt model by Q4 of 2007 and a 120 lm/watt model by Q4 2008. The company says it will first sell Acriche to its key customers, and then it will begin selling to several general lighting companies sometime next year. Company News Release.
Color Kinetics' LED String Lights Showcased in Movie, Deck the Halls
SSLDesign News Staff
November 17, 2006...Many neighbors have friendly competitions to see who can have the best holiday lighting display. Color Kinetics has helped to set the bar too high for mere amateur lighting designers and lighting architects. The company’s products and solutions play a major role in a feature film called “Deck the Halls”. The Twentieth Century Fox film staring Danny Devito and Mathew Broadrick will be release nationwide on November 22.
In the film, Devito and Broadrick play dueling neighbors who try to outdo each other in this year’s home holiday lighting display. "This is a film that literally hinges on the lighting -- where the lights are a central character. Anything less than spectacular would have failed the story," said Jason McKinnon of Electric Aura Lighting Design, who conceptualized the ground-breaking lighting sequences along with Rob Sondergaard. "Based on their highly programmable and durable nature, we knew that LEDs were the only feasible choice to make our concept a reality. Color Kinetics' technology exceeded our expectations, allowing us to turn the house into a three-dimensional video display that is the movie's climatic centerpiece."
Color Kinetics iColor Flex SL was utilized to achieve the effect of a totally programmable string of lights. While it resembles a conventional string of lights, each node contains a tri-color LED that is capable of additive color mixing of red, blue, and green light. Each node can act much like a pixel in a video screen and can therefore display any one of about 24 billion colors. Strands of iColor Flex SL covered the house that served as the movie’s centerpiece. The house was essentially wrapped in a digital skin with 14,300 nodes in all. LIGHTimes SecondPage members login for more. Guests can view membership details.
Toronto, Canada to Starts LED Holiday Light Exchange
SSLDesign News Staff
November 17, 2006...Canada has again taken the lead in energy conservation and LED adoption. Toronto Hydro, an electric company for the city of Toronto is sponsoring an LED Holiday Light Exchange. In the exchange, which is part of Toronto’s “Urban Lights” holiday lighting ceremony, 500 families can each exchange one set of old holiday lights for a set of energy saving LED holiday lighting. Unlike the exchange in Brampton, Ontario Canada, this LED light exchange allows even non-residents to exchange their old holiday lights. The exchange however is limited to 500 strings of lights, so there will likely be a line.
The Downtown Yonge Holiday Lighting Ceremony will take place on Saturday, November 18, 2006, 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Part of the display will feature giant three-dimensional starbursts of multi-coloured lights suspended high above Yonge-Dundas Square. A new 35 foot light tree sculptural with 52,000 blue and white LED lights will also grace the square through the support of Yonge-Dundas Square and Tourism Toronto's Cultural Enhancement Program.
The LED Holiday Lighting exchange in Brampton, Ontario Canada, was the first we had heard of. (Ref: Coverage). Fortunately another City, this time Toronto, has taken the idea a step further and offered the LED holiday light exchange to the first 500 people (one string per family whether or not they are residents). We here at SSLDesign applaud the city of Toronto for having the foresight to begin such a program. (Ref: Toronto News Release).
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Bring On The Holidays!
Jo Ann McDonald, founding editor
November 21, 2006...From what we surmised attending CS Week in San Antonio, Texas last week, the compound semi (CS) and solid state lighting (SSL) industries are due for a well-deserved end of year break. In the USA, the traditional Thanksgiving holidays, commencing this Thursday and running thru the weekend, mark the beginning of the Winter Holidays, which are celebrated in their various forms throughout the world.
Family gatherings abound, which are a great time to let those near and dear to you know what you've been doing all year. It is also a time to share with them the reasons you're so seldom available! You've undoubtedly been working excessively hard and overtime to get all those power amps to reach further, those LEDs to burn brighter and longer, and those research projects to reach their goals on schedule. And if you're not an actual participant in our bleeding edge technologies, you're trying to get a handle on what's the next great thing just around the corner.
We had a great snapshot album of various prospects at CS Week. In case you weren't tuned in to that event, it combined IEEE's annual Compound Semiconductor IC Symposium (CSICS), formerly known as the GaAs IC Symposium, and the UK-based Institute of Physics (IOP) Publishing's Key Conference. It ran from Nov. 12 through 15. CSICS tallied up 250 attendees this year and Key drew 80. For this veteran industry journalist, it was like Old Home Week, with some of my favorite people helping me celebrate my birthday into the wee hours of the beautiful Texas nights. As usual, most of the "important" business goes down in the conference hallways and, in this case, down the San Antonio Riverwalk. The term "hallways" was actually a misnomer this time around as CS Week was held in the huge San Antonio conference center where we felt like a covey of tiny quail huddled in a corner of a huge open space. My preference is always to hold these affairs in the more intimate surroundings of a cozy hotel where the meeting attendees dominate their space and everyone you see is "one of your group." It's simply more fun that way, and lots more business gets accomplished as a result.
But the quality of the attendees at CSICS was excellent and some of the talks were right on target in enlightening us about the progress going on inside several key companies. Roller skates weren't actually necessary, as I'd jokingly advised when promoting the combo event, as the organizers kindly located the two meeting rooms right next to one another. But a golf cart might have come in handy getting to our quail refuge corner in the overly huge, obviously Texas size conference center. The rooms were dark and caverned and one couldn't wait to get out into the sunshine. One of the more humorous sites was the flood of cellphone users in the cavernous foyer outside the meeting rooms. It looked like the staging of a yuppie ad and gave this rural dwelling observer ample opportunity to catch up on what Blackberries and the other new handheld devices actually looked like, not to mention the newest urban "looks". the coolest of the cool was Michael Lebby, president and CEO of OIDA. Dressed in all black and sporting the new urban look, Michael had a very trendy headset glued to his handsome bald head that was the envy of all the guys losing their hair. He was so inspiring I started a makeover campaign for one of my favorite pals (and host of my birthday party), Cree cofounder, executive VP and SiC/GaN electronic device guru, John Palmour, who presented excellent updates at both CSICS and Key Conference.
If you don't already know about OIDA, you should. OIDA stands for "The Optoelectronics Industry Development Association," a Washington DC-based, not-for-profit association that serves as "the nexus for vision, transformation, and growth of the optoelectronics industry." Its mission is to advance the competitiveness of its members by focusing on the business of technology, not just technology itself. According to Michael, it's moving to be a true trade association. OIDA provides roadmaps, reports, and market data for the optoelectronics industry, serves as the voice of industry to government and academia, acts as liaison with other optoelectronic industry associations worldwide, and provides a network for the exchange of ideas and information within the optoelectronics community. I'll be reviewing Michael's update in an upcoming McDonald Report and we hope to have him as a featured speaker at our annual CS Vision event this coming June. The event (an outgrowth of the old CS Outlook conferences) is slated to be held in Dallas, Texas June 12-13, 2007.
Speaking of CS Vision, the website address for that event is www.CompoundSemiVision.com. When you click there, you'll see what we did last year in Vancouver in 2006 in conjunction with CS Mantech (CS Vision 2006) and soon we'll have the 2007 meet details posted. FYI... we too tried going the "co-location" route, but found that it's simply overload for too many folks who wanted to attend both events, so we're bringing it back to Dallas on its own where past Outlooks have been held. CS Vision is the classic "insiders meet" bringing together senior management, especially from the materials and equipment sectors, to meet face-to-face with all the leading market researchers and industry visionaries (like Michael Lebby) and a handful of leading edge device people. Together, we look 5 years out, throw a few tomatoes at the market researchers (or praise their work, depending on how well their crystal balls are working), blame the substrate guys (as usual) for all the industry ills, and prod the equipment and gas people to help us squeeze more manufacturing costs out of our products. We also have a good time getting together in an intimate setting that promotes honest and abundant dialog. At CS Week this year, I invited Phil Yin, president and CEO of AXT, and Keith Evans, president and CEO of Kyma to co-chair CS Vision 2007. They accepted and, together, we plan to have an excellent meet for this traditional "CEO's Club". Plan now to attend. (We'll supply the tomatoes.)
Finally, I want to publicly thank the organizers of CSICS and Key Conference for hosting a great week in San Antonio. It went like clockwork and nobody had to get out the hook to pull speakers away from the podium for going overtime. I'd especially like to single out Michael Hatcher, editor of Compound Semiconductor magazine. Mike did a wonderful job putting this year's Key Conference together and was the perfect host. His UK crew, including Fiona and Claire, made this an especially memorable event. They're a great crew and terrific fun to boot. I've invited Mike to CS Vision so that we could feature a genuine press panel to put our CS industry CEOs on the "hot spot" along with another terrific industry journalist who attended CS Week, namely Mark Telford. Mark is former editor of III-Vs Review and he and Darren Cummings (formerly advertising manager for III-Vs) have gone into partnership to form a new digital magazine for the advanced semiconductor industry. They're calling it "Semiconductor Today and its website is www.semiconductor-today.com. If you scroll down the "about us" page, you'll see pictures of Mark and Darren and ad manager Jon Craxford. We welcome Mark and his crew back to the fold and look forward to their in-depth coverage of our exciting industry.
In the weeks ahead, I'll be reviewing some of the major talks at CS Week. In the meantime, put your feet up, relax, and think seriously about not thinking toooo seriously in those weeks ahead, because as far as we're concerned, it's the start of the holiday season! Relax and... enjoy! There's plenty of work and challenges ahead for everyone in 2007... which will be here faster than you can say (or spell) "compound semiconductors!" And have a wonderful Thanksgiving Holiday this weekend, everyone. There's tons and tons to be thankful for within our unique international communities.
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