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Formosa Advanced Technologies Company to Package and Process LEDs
LIGHTimes Staff
July 1, 2008...Formosa Advanced Technologies Company to Package and Process LEDs
Formosa Advanced Technologies Company (FATC) reported that it will enter into LED chip backend production, according to a Digitimes article. The article indicated that FATC expects the corresponding contribution in revenues from the LED backend production processing will double in a year.
FATC chose to delve into the market for LED wafer grinding, sawing, probing, and sorting. The company said in the article that in light of the volatile memory market that it was in, LED packaging and processing would be a profitable venture. Apparently, the company already has many of the same processing technologies that are needed for LED processing and packaging because LED processing and packaging is similar to DRAM production, the article indicated. Only 2 to 3 percent of the company’s revenues are expected to come from LED processing and packaging in 2008, but the company predicts that revenue will rise to 5 to 10 percent of its total revenues in 2009.
Carmanah Announces Restructuring, and Manufacturing Outsourcing
LIGHTimes Staff
June 26, 2008...Carmanah Technologies, a maker of solar powered LED modules headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia Canada, has announced a restructuring of the company. The company indicated that it hopes the restructuring will help reduce expenses, increase efficiency, and provide sustained profitable growth. As part of its plan the company said it would focus more on its lighting business. The company also said it would outsource manufacturing to Flextronics International Ltd.
The company will therefore close its Victoria, BC-based "Enterprise" manufacturing facility by February 2009. In addition, the company announced that it would close its U.S. solar component distribution business and California warehouse by September 2008, as well as its Calgary, Alberta office and warehouse by October 2008. However, the company indicated that administrative functions from the California and Calgary locations will be moved to the its headquarters in Victoria, British Columbia Canada.
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LEDtech and Other Taiwan Companies Make Inroads in Refrigerator Case Lighting
LIGHTimes Staff
June 26, 2008...Walmart and United Supermarkets have chosen to start using LED lighting in their refrigerator cases. Both stores have chosen LED lighting from GE Lumination to light their refrigerator cases in many stores. However, that is not the only option that companies have. Another company, LEDtech has made significant inroads into the refrigerator case lighting market.
LEDtech Electronics of Taiwan, an LED packaging firm, has received orders for light bars for 200 Taiwan convenience stores, according to an article in Digitimes. According to the article, the convenience store chain in Taiwan has nearly 3000 refrigerator lighting units that will need to have LED units over the next three to four years. Other Taiwan-based companies are reportedly competing for the next round of orders from the convenience store chain.
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Philips France to Light Office Entirely with LEDs
SSLDesign News Staff
June 26, 2008...A subsidiary of Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands, Royal Philips France, said that it will supply the LED lighting for the first office in the world to be entirely lit by LEDs.
The office, owned by Generali and located at 100 Champs-Elysées Avenue in Paris, will have functional office lighting and scene and atmospheric effects entirely done with LEDs. Generali commissioned Architect Anthony Béchu to design ‘an innovative window in the world of LEDs’.
Generali chose LEDs because of the extreme long lifetime of LEDs and the minimal maintenance costs.
Throughout the office space, 422 luminaires are integrated into a false ceiling with 600 x 600 grids. Philips says that each luminaire is powered by 16 or 12 high power LEDs of 2.6 W depending on their location in the office space. This provides an average of 300 lux everywhere and 500 lux on the working planes. Philips notes that part of the success of its LED lighting solutions has been come from the specially developed optics.
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Future Lighting Donates Luxeon Rebel LEDs for Solar Car Project
LIGHTimes Staff
June 24, 2008...Future Lighting Solutions, a distributor of Luxeon Rebel LEDs from Philips Lumileds, reported that it has donated Luxeon Rebel LEDs for use on a solar car designed and built by students at the University of Minnesota. Future Lighting says that the car will compete in the 2008 North American Solar Challenge, a 2,400-mile race scheduled for July 13-22. Luxeon Rebel LEDs are surface mountable high power LEDs, that the Philips Lumileds says produce the highest light output per package and the highest light density (lumens/ mm2).
“The LEDs available to us for our solar-powered car three years ago were larger and nowhere near as bright as the Luxeon Rebel LEDs available today. These newer power LEDs take a big step forward in power and usability,” said Jeff Hammer, a UM instructor and solar car project faculty advisor. “This contribution from Future Lighting Solutions played an important role in optimizing the vehicle’s signal lighting, minimizing power requirements, and helping us assemble the resources to complete this year’s solar car project.”
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Insights Into Energy Star for SSL - The Battle Continues
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
June 26, 2008...The battle as I see it is "simple versus valuable". In a June 24 web conference, we heard from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding their "technical amendment" to the Residential Lighting Fixture (RLF) specification 4.2. It's a simple way for a manufacturer to achieve Energy Star qualification for any fixture incorporating a qualified LED "light engine". If you need a catch up, you can read more about the reaction to this "double top secret" program in our last editorial. Overall, it didn't play really well when the EPA announced that it had effectively created a whole new technology specification without regard to any public process, review or implementation mandates (Rule book? What rule book?). We can only speculate on the EPA's motivation (which we did last time), and it is really hard to assign them even somewhat noble intentions. You don't secretly create industry specifications when you believe they are the best thing for the industry. Nonetheless, our objective is to encourage the EPA to do the right thing, and helping the industry and affected stakeholders understand the issues will allow the collective pressure to continue urging them towards what most of the industry sees as the correct path for retaining value in the Energy Star "brand".
In a nutshell, the EPA
came up with module-level criteria that would allow "LED light engines"
to be the Energy Star qualifying unit in residential applications. Their introduction
to the spec sums it up pretty well, "EPA has adopted test procedures that
are focused on the light source, not accounting for the optical effects of glass
or plastic diffusers which tend to be selected by consumers based on aesthetic
versus performance considerations. Accordingly, the adopted test procedure is
designed to evaluate the performance of LED light engines, which integrate an
LED package(s), driver and heat sink into a single unit. This approach is consistent
with the existing RLF program approach to testing light source and ballast combinations
(a.k.a. "platforms") in the context of fluorescent technology."
In their conference call, the EPA calls it a "technology neutral approach",
which would seem to make sense when comparing fairly equal technologies that do
fairly equal things. LEDs differ from CFLs at least as much as CFLs differ from
oil lamps (and likely even more).
It is important to acknowledge that the DOE's Energy Star approach, arrived at through the public and open process that is mandated by the governing program regulations, does add a burden to residential fixture manufacturers that they have not had in the past. Since Energy Star came along fairly late in the market adoption failure curve for CFL technology, it merely got to help clean up the mess rather than taking a role to help avert it. By the time there was an Energy Star RLF qualification, consumers were generally seeing that CFLs, in their different forms, provide them with a decent quality and predictable light source. At that point, if they get a "bad one" (slow to reach full light output or flickering), they simply take it back to their local superstore and don't buy that brand again. Here is the difference with SSL: Taking it back and choosing a different CFL "bulb" or fixture is a lot different than taking it back and not buying that technology again for 3, 5 or 10 years. At the current residential early-adoption stage, if there is a poorly performing fixture, it's the LED technology inside that will take the blame since it is considered "the unknown" in the equation.
The EPA RLF specification allows such a range of light engines, from dim to bright, and from warm to harsh white, that it seems unlikely that the consumer will be able to discern whether a particular light engine is potentially useful to them or not, much less being able to extend the thinking into the impact on the fixture would be. In their conference call, the EPA addressed the classic "CFL failure" by stating that, "We will actively protect the value of the Energy Star brand. If we see harsh, dim lights showing up through the program, we'll take actions to eliminate that." Obvious question: If you know that an inferior product solution can achieve certification under the spec, why not simply define the spec in a way that does not provide inferior combinations with the opportunity for certification?" Obvious answers: A) When you're in too much of a hurry, details like that can be overlooked or B) That would have led to the larger question of whether simply basing a fixture's Energy Star rating on the qualification of the light-source component even makes sense at this stage in the adoption curve.
As far as the stakeholders are concerned, there are two main camps. One would be the fixture manufacturers that appreciate the EPA's approach because it lowers their burden. DOE kept that in mind when they adopted a "qualifying family" approach, which basically means that a fixture manufacturer can qualify the lowest performing member of basic design, where a single housing has differing lenses, trim and baffles, and apply the qualification to all the other members of the family. There will be some testing by Energy Star to verify the rules are being met, and a violation will simply need to be corrected. You aren't tossed out of the program. How much does that testing add up to for a product family? Something on the order of $500 to $1500 for complete luminaire photometric and UL-conformant heat testing. Not exactly a piggybank breaker given the current value of the LED-based products.
The other stakeholders who oppose the EPA approach are those specifically within the solid state lighting specific portion of the lighting industry, who need SSL to succeed, and the utility companies. The utilities invest billions of ratepayer funds in support of energy efficiency programs. They also want to see SSL succeed sooner rather than later, and as a result, the recognition that confusing or possibly ineffective standards will slow things down is not escaping them. At least one utility behemoth, California-based Pacific Gas & Electric Company(PG&E) made a fairly clear statement against the current EPA approach. The statement was an element of a question asked by Mary Matteson Bryan, Lighting Portfolio Manager for Emerging Technologies at Pacific Gas and Electric Company (or PG&E) during the June 26 DOE conference Energy Star webcast where she asked, "With the release of RLF 4.2, PG&E is very concerned about potential marketplace confusion with two different SSL Energy Star specifications in place. In fact, until the current issues over Energy Star for SSL are resolved, PG&E does not plan to include products qualified under the EPA RLF 4.2 specification in our incentive programs. Has DOE been contacted by manufacturers or customers who share this concern and are confused?" The DOE answer was, "Yes, we have been contacted by a number of concerned stakeholders and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible, and at high levels of our two agencies." ... C'mon EPA, let's pull the spec back and re-do the process with stakeholder involvement.
Editorial Correction: A few weeks ago, in our coverage of a Philips Lumileds Lighting announcement regarding the adoption of their Luxeon Rebel products into several Philips LED module products, we did not make it fully clear that the LED modules were not a Philips Lumileds product. Philips Lumileds designs and manufactures LEDs, not lighting modules and their intention was to highlight what they see as the advantages of Philips Lumileds Luxeon products in modules of those types, regardless of whose modules those might be. Other Philips lighting companies and divisions are responsible for the design, production and sale of the variety of modules and luminaires. We apologize for any confusion that may have resulted from our original wording in that article.
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