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Taiwan Wants to Establish LED Streetlight Standards by 2009
SSLDesign News Staff
May 29, 2008...Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) reportedly hopes to accelerate reaching a set of standards for LED street lamps, according to an article in Digitimes. The MOEA reportedly expects to publish its first set of standards during Q1 2009, the article indicated. The agency in part hopes to catch up with the progress of governments from other countries. In 2007, the MOEA reportedly created an alliance to help establish LED lighting standards and hold quality reviews in 2007. Wednesday, the alliance introduced five related protocols, which will be sent for review by the Bureau of Standards, Meteorology and Inspection (BSMI). According to the published protocols, LED street lamps will be required to deliver a life-cycle of 20,000 hours. Additionally, a device operating continuously for 11 hours per day, will be required to carry a life-cycle of five years. The agency is targeting the end of 2008 as the time for the complete review of 11 protocols (which includes standards for in-door LED lighting applications) by year-end 2008. The MOEA expects to release its finalized standards in March 2009. LIGHTimes SecondPage members login for more. Guests can view membership details.
Philips Lumileds Announces Technology and Process for Bin Number and Size Reduction
LIGHTimes Staff
May 29, 2008...Philips Lumileds announced at LightFair International in Las Vegas, Nevada USA, that it has reduced the number of white color bins for the company’s warm white Luxeon Rebel LEDs. The company cites a new technology roadmap for Lumiramic phosphor technology as the reason for the improvement in white LED consistency. Philips Lumileds calls the binning of white LEDS, a “work around”, that helps LED manufacturers manage the variation in color and tint that is part of the LED fabrication and packaging process. The company points out that to date no solutions decrease or eliminate the risk of inconsistency. Philips Lumileds also points out that most LED makers have resorted to producing greater volumes of LEDs and discarding those that do not fit within the desired color ranges. This ultimately results in higher costs.
The company explained in its latest press release that while white LED efficiency has improved to 80 lm/W over the last 18 months, the industry still needs to improve consistency. Philips Lumileds says it has taken a major step in that direction with its Lumiramic phosphor technology. Philips Lumileds’ key innovation, is a process in which the Lumiramic phosphor technology of pre-measured ceramic plates is matched with a TFFC die of appropriate thickness and correct wavelengths to target specific color temperature.
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Cree Signs Patent Agreement With Toyoda Gosei
LIGHTimes Staff
May 29, 2008...Cree, Inc. of Durham, North Carolina USA, announced that it has entered into an agreement with Toyoda Gosei providing the companies (including wholly owned affiliates) with access to each other’s patented LED chip and packaged LED technology (including white LED technology). Toyoda Gosei and Cree have agreed in the future to discuss “have made” rights for LED chips. Cree and Toyoda Gosei both hold broad and substantial optoelectronic patent portfolios. Cree reports that the agreement will make it easier for both companies to develop and manufacture LED products without concern for the other’s patents. Other terms of the patent agreement were not disclosed but are not expected to have any material financial effect on either party. LIGHTimes SecondPage members login for more. Guests can view membership details.
Sony, Sanyo, Exceed, and Lucky Light to License Technology from Neumark Rothschild
CompoundSemi News Staff
May 27, 2008...Columbia University Professor Emerita, Gertrude Neumark Rothschild again appears to be on the winning side as another group of companies agrees to settle with her in her patent dispute against 31 companies brought before the U.S. International Trade Commission. Two Goliaths of consumer electronics, Sony Corp. and Sany Electric Co. Ltd., and lesser known companies, Lucky Light and Exceed, have reportedly agreed to license the patented technology from Rothschild. The technology is a basic component in the production of Blu-ray video players, violet laser diodes, violet LEDs, mobile phones, and digital cameras. Details of the agreements were not released. Seoul Semiconductor Co. Ltd, a maker of LEDs, and Taiwan's Everlight Electronics Co. Ltd. signed licensing agreements with Professor Neumark Rothschild. According to her legal council, Professor Neumark Rothschild conducted groundbreaking research in the 1980s and 1990s into the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and laser diodes crucial to a many consumer electronics products.
While the Rothschild has made significant progress in the lawsuit, the fight is far from over. The Professor Emerita’s complaint to the ITC seeks to block the imports of infringing products, including video players using Blu-ray format, Motorola Razr phones, and Hitachi camcorders, as well as products containing blue, green, violet, ultraviolet, and white light emitting diodes and laser diodes. Other companies named in the suit reportedly include Hitachi Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., LG Electronics Inc., Nokia Corp., Samsung Group, Sharp Corp. Sony Ericsson Mobile and Toshiba Corp. Dreier LLP News Release
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LEDs at Light Fair - Everybody selling, but who's buying?
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
May 30, 2008...Mission assignment: Sort through the zillion or so exhibits in the Las Vegas Convention Center to find the companies that claim they are serious about selling solid state lighting fixtures or enabling technologies/modules that bring LED-lighting to everyone's life. In 2007, that narrowed the field to about 1/2 the exhibitors. Here in 2008, it almost appeared as though the only ones not offering some kind of LED-lighting products were the security people (but I suspect they were merely in stealth mode and likely have products in late-stage R&D). If a visitor from another planet happened to land in Las Vegas this week, (and I'm talking a real alien, not just the "interesting folks" that are wall-to-wall on the strip after 11pm), they would be pretty sure that LED-based lighting was the most common technology among the millions of light fixtures streaming out of manufacturers' and distributors' doors every month. Heck, according to the voice on the monorail train, 6000 people per month move to Las Vegas. As a minimum, if we put them in apartments with 10 LED downlights, 4 under-cabinet strips, and at least 1 fixture in the refrigerator, that's 90,000 LED fixtures per month or a bit over 1 million fixtures annually in this one town, just for new residential construction. What a great market!
Of course, we're not there yet. Solid state lighting is just reaching a point where it can cost effectively fill some key niches in the general lighting environment, almost exclusively in near 24x7 applications such as hotel lobbies and elevators, and outside where the higher efficacy cool white devices can really "shine". So what are all those products doing in all those booths? Well, frightening the heck out of the customers is one possibility. Lighting specifiers, and other sane mortals, have to find themselves asking, "With all these LED products out here, am I crazy for not using them? And do any of them really work because it's obvious there's plenty of junk as part of the show and tell?" Common enough questions, and just in case you didn't find the answers, no, you're not crazy and yes, some of them are really work. So far, the specifiers aren't being widely fooled by the pretend products, which is a good thing. In addition, the first key SSL specifications have arrived on the scene and customers can now start asking for the spec data to help them separate the wheat from the chaff (more on that next time). With nice rational fears in play, we're also seeing a few irrational ones as well.
In a pre-exhibition session, one lighting designer shared the technology lessons he had gained from his experiences, which included outfitting at least one skyscraper in the Middle East with a color changing exterior LED lighting scheme. He had implemented a number of creative solutions in response to the hot desert environment, and experienced a lot of frustration with installation issues, such as stretched interconnects that led to shorts and failures, but it had led him on a bit of quest to understand the full variety of challenges that were lurking in the LED technology. His investigations led him all the way down to the epitaxial process at the pre-LED wafer level, and to what he perceived as the "Achilles' heel" of the technology. You grow crystals on a substrate and, he asked, "How many of us have had those crystal kits or grown sugar crystals on a string? We all know how random that is. That's the same basic thing that happens here, so you will never get very predictable results... that's why they do something called color binning." The audience understood him to then extend that premise to a firm belief that once an LED chip is characterized at the chip level (during a blink-of-an-eye duration test, in which it never heats up beyond a comfortable room temperature), that once it is installed into some type of package and allowed to heat up to a more normal electronic chip kind of temperature, that the color could shift in a random direction, and to a random extent. Hence, he concluded, it's unlikely we would ever get predictable side-by-side color samples, especially from white LEDs.
Could this be true? New mission: Find the people that have the answers to the inconsistency concern. At the Osram Sylvania booth, my host had procured the right person to discuss color shifting and staunchly refused to give him up, even during an attempt to get him over to the DOE group that was on tour. (Sorry Jim, I got him first... which is lucky as we needed a column. We'll cover the Round 5 CALiPER results next time). The answer to the question was what I suspected. Yes, they do shift substantially under temperature. While their binning has been narrowed down to 3 MacAdam ellipses (basically undetectable to the eye), the color shift at temperature can be as much as 7 MacAdam ellipses, BUT it does it predictably and they have the curves to back it up. Discussions elsewhere confirmed the same type of thing, and with the addition of a great point from Philips Lumileds. That paraphrase is that when customers ask about "the heat problem" or "the binning problem", they're only problems if you aren't engineering your product. We don't call it a "problem" that you need to put a heat sink and fan on a Pentium processor chip. We don't spend much time concerned about Intel's inconsistent manufacturing processes, which are all built on variable crystal structures. They call their binning fancy names like "2.8 GHz Pentium Duo" and "3.0 GHz Pentium Duo", and sell the faster bin for a higher price and the slower bin for less (how sneaky is that!). It's kind of how things are handled with semiconductors, and why there is still some confusion. We're seeing the tremors that naturally come when technology areas gently collide -- semiconductors meet lighting and a new knowledge base is required to bridge the gap.
So we come back to the question of who is buying? The knowledgeable specifiers who are willing to ask a supplier to defend why their product is a good one, and to require them to back it up with real data and real results. They ask for guarantees, and they aren't afraid to ask for help to put the pieces together. I would also submit that they are the ones who aren't shy about suggesting that a product might need some improvement when it's obvious that it does. Knowledge will be king for specifiers, reps, distributors and lighting manufacturers. There's still a lot to learn together. (Beam me up, Scotty).
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