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Dell to Transition to LED-Backlit Displays
LIGHTimes Staff
September 25, 2008...Austin, Texas-based computer maker, Dell reports that it will transition to all LED-backlit laptops over the next 12 months. Dell boasts that the switch to LED backlighting and 100 percent mercury free computers is part of its commitment to become the “greenest” technology company on the planet. Dell plans to transition all of its new laptop displays to light-emitting diode (LED) in the next 12 months, a major achievement in its commitment to become the ‘greenest’ technology company on the planet. Starting December 15, 2008, two-thirds of Dell LatitudeTM E-Family laptops will reportedly be shipped with mercury-free LED back lighting as a standard feature. This includes the Latitude E4200, E4300, E6400, E6400 ATG and E6500. Also shipping with LED back lighting as a standard display will be the Dell Precision™ M2400 and M4400 mobile workstations.
“Our customers have made it clear that they want the greenest technology possible,” Jeff Clarke, senior vice president, Dell Product Group said during the company’s mobility summit in Monte Carlo today. “As an industry, we can shape the future of green innovation and significantly reduce the carbon footprint associated with mobile computing. Dell is committed to leading the transition to energy-efficient LED technology.”
The company points to the fact that, Dell’s 15-inch LED displays consume an average of 43 percent less power at maximum brightness. This resulting in significant cost and carbon savings. The company estimates customer savings of approximately $20 million and 220 million kilowatt-hours in 2010 and 2011 combined. According to their estimates this would be the equivalent of annual CO2 emissions resulting from energy use of more than 10,000 homes. Dell also estimates that at least 80 percent of its total laptop volume will be delivered with LED as a standard back-lit display by the end of 2009 and 100 percent in 2010. The company says that it has been developing the LED backlit displays over the past 18 months. Dell expects that its actions will pave the way for others in the industry to follow. Company News Release
LedEngin, Inc. Begins Production of its 5 and 10 Watt Deep Red High Power LEDs
LIGHTimes Staff
September 25, 2008...LedEngin of Santa Clara, California USA, announced that it has begun producing 5 and 10-watt Deep Red LEDs. The Deep Red LEDs add to the companies portfolio which includes: The company produces 3- to 15-watt versions of cool white, warm white, red, blue, green, RGB, RGBA, a color they call Dental Blue, and UV LEDs. The company’s Deep Red LEDs have a typical peak wavelength of 660 nm. The company points out that this wavelength is in the range of red light that promotes the most photosynthesis in growing vegetables and plants and producing the most flowers and buds. LIGHTimes SecondPage members login for more. Guests can view membership details.
Palomar Technologies to Showcase LED Packaging Technology at LEDs 2008
LIGHTimes Staff
September 25, 2008...Palomar Technologies, a provider of contract assembly services for microelectronics, announced that it will showcase its methods for packaging LEDs at the LEDs 2008 conference. The conference will be held September 29-October 1, 2008 at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina in San Diego, California.
Palomar contends that its pulse heat eutectic die attach and wire chain bonding equipment and services allow manufacturers of LEDs to derive the maximum lumens per watt possible and achieve the highest brightness possible in power LEDs.
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Seoul Semiconductor Contends it is not Infringing Nichia's Patent
LIGHTimes Staff
September 23, 2008...Seoul Semiconductor contends that its Acriche products do not infringe upon Nichia’s patent for “annealing” technology. On September 17, 2008, Nichia announced that it had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Seoul Semiconductor in the UK for infringement of its “annealing” patent. (Ref: Coverage). Shortly after, Seoul Semiconductor announced it had the means to establish its non-infringement of any valid claim from Nichia in the English High Court. Seoul says that not only do its Acriche products not infringe on Nichia’s patent claims in England, Seoul contends that it has sufficient prior art to have Nichia's patent revoked as it is invalid.
Seoul’s legal team notes that the its Acriche products are being manufactured under a licence for a related technology from Rothschild Neumark and UCSB. (Ref: ).
For this reason Seoul says it believes that it doesn't infringe Nichia's patent. Seoul says it does not understand how Nichia's patent in this lawsuit can be valid over Professor Neumark's [earlier] patent and preceding technologies.
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Osram and Philips Finalize LED Cross-license Agreement for LED Technologies in Luminaires
LIGHTimes Staff
September 23, 2008...Osram announced that manufacturers using key components from Osram will not have to pay licensing fees to Philips because Osram has obtained special rights from Philips. Osram boasts that through its agreement with Philips, luminaire manufacturers would be released from the costs of the licensing program recently published by Philips. According to Osram, the special rights that it obtained from Philips also apply to patents held by Color Kenetics and TIR systems, which were both acquired by Philips last year.
Both Osram and Philips have agreed not to divulge the compensatory payment for the special rights.
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How Is That LED Thing Doing?
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
September 22, 2008...Sometimes it can seem as though the "ready for prime time any minute now" mantra can be repeated enough that it loses meaning. So how ready are high brightness LEDs for the various "prime time" opportunities that many of us would contend that they are destined for? Might be a good idea to take a step back from the day to day to see how far the industry has come, and postulate on whether it really points to an acceleration or just a steady march towards the various applications LEDs can find themselves in. (If you're highly lighting-oriented, it might prove interesting for you to catch some thought-snippets from outside the lighting mainstream to assist with the "belief thing").
So what has happened with the various adoption curves so far? The 'grandaddy' application for high brightness LEDs would likely be traffic signals. Red and yellow LEDs had a substantial lead on the blue ones, and as a result, found an early niche in our stop/mash-the-gas-its-yellow friends that keep things flowing along the streets of the world. The 'go' light lagged behind since traffic signal green isn't green but "cyan" and falls in the "blue" technology spectrum that had to wait for the 2003 "blue revolution". They've turned out to work well and live up to the vast majority of the promises for lifetime, energy and maintenance cost-savings. "But," you say, "I've seen traffic signals with a streak of dead LEDs in them." To take a semantic twist on it, what you've most likely seen is a streak of unlit LEDs. One of the largest suppliers of LEDs to the signal industry, Philips Lumileds, reported last February that they had received reports from one of their customers who has deployed a sizable percentage of the traffic signals over the years, that they have had zero failures attributed to the LEDs themselves. If we assume for a minute that it hasn't been quite that perfect, but just nearly so, it's a handy data point. If LEDs were indeed a noticeable culprit, as opposed to the drivers or other circuits and interconnects, the signal manufacturer would have said so. Few companies like to keep the blame if they can find a friend to share it with. At a minimum, it would appear that any individual LED failure has been of such little consequence, it hasn't been worth reporting. Reliability doesn't get much better than that. Keep in mind as well that since 2001 or so, the state-of-the art in LED signals has not been the "light full of LEDs" where you can see a string of them dead, but rather a handful back there essentially where the old bulb would have lived, with a diffuser and lensing in-between. If you see the individual LED, the odds are that you're looking at a pretty old signal.
A March 2002 report from the California Energy Commission reported that, "...through its program offering loans and grants to local agencies, over 236,780 old incandescent red, green and amber traffic signals, along with pedestrian walk and don't-walk signals, have been replaced with new lamps that use light emitting diodes (LEDs). The new LED lights reduce the State's need for electricity by nearly 10 megawatts, enough electricity to power nearly 10,000 typical California homes. That reduced electricity demand should save the 80 public agencies participating in the program $7.9M annually." That was 2002. LEDs won the battle and today it's pretty much simply a question of when a city can allocate the capital investment to make the retrofits and realize the payback.
In another recognizable application area, cellular handsets jumped in to the LED adoption curve with the "hip" blue key lighting, shortly followed by widespread adoption of white LEDs for those and the displays. Low profile, low power, long life and undemanding color requirements drove quick acceptance starting in 2003, leading to virtually 100% market share a short time later. During 2004-2005 period, we watched those LEDs drop in price by a factor of 10 or more. Other handheld devices, including PDAs and music/video players made the move to LEDs right on their heels, and it hard to find a non-LED based small display at this point in history. What a difference 3-4 years has made.
In the larger display markets if you have the space, the cold-cathode fluorescent (CCFL) incumbents are cost-effective and long-lived. It's when color rendering demands raise their heads that LEDs start to shine. RGB solutions are pretty much the only choice at that point, which tends to drive the costs pretty high due to the component count. Continued efficiency increases and a few technical innovations, including Luminus Devices Phlatlight "blades" are suggesting there could be a rapid change in the large display dynamic, especially as LED-driven solutions appear in showrooms and put to shame the incumbent's color capabilities. We're passed the point in 2006 when a "big-box" consumer product store salesperson confided to me that they couldn't show the $10,000 LED-based flat panel TV because the color was so much better, they feared consumers would simply stop buying big screen TVs for two years waiting for the price to fall.
A number of automotive applications have made use of LEDs, but like commercial lighting applications, the business case has been selective. Center high-mounted safety lamps (CHMSLs or "third brake lights") made the move most quickly, since they were a short wide display where space constraints were of paramount concern. Add to the equation that they were red, which has always been the brightness and cost-effectiveness leader of the LED colors, and virtually every CHMSL today is LED-based. The remaining taillights are an interesting example of somewhere that LEDs do work better from a maintenance and form-factor perspective, but are so interrelated to other engineered systems that they are having to follow a methodical take-over process from higher end vehicles on down. More than one automotive lighting integrator has had the question asked of them regarding the ability to add resistance or increase drive currents in the LED circuit so that the automobile systems designers didn't have to re-engineer their full lighting system, with its various methods of detecting a failed bulb and interconnections to remote entry and security systems. (You're correct if you suspect that higher resistance and more current are characteristics that the incumbent incandescents are famous for... no improvement there.)
Other markets, including indoor and outdoor signage show similar mixed bags regarding the current cost-effectivity of an LED-based solution, but it's important to note that all of the available applications are being served to some extent by LEDs, and not for their novelty or "just to be trendy". They work and are winning with reality-based business cases. And we've seen LED solutions reach a tipping point in a number of applications where they become the solution and progress from there to take over the market.... it isn't hard to reach towards a conclusion that LEDs take over every niche they are qualified for, and that it really seems to be about "when" and not "if" LEDs can meet a specific lighting application need.
Which brings us to the big kahuna application, general lighting. LED lighting is proving itself viable right now in any 24x7 application being served by a compact fluorescent or halogen downlight (and many spotlights) where contract-maintenance is required (if an employee just pulls out a ladder and does it themselves, the energy savings versus CFL is on the verge, but not fully there yet... if they fall off the ladder, it becomes a different story). In addition, the efficiency has moved quickly enough that the "when" for many industrial and outdoor applications, which don't shy away from the cooler color temperatures, is "starting now". According to Dr. Robert Steele of Strategies Unlimited, "The efficacy of commercial cool white LEDs has nearly doubled since 2005, now approaching 100 lumens-per-watt. Warm white is lagging the cooler white in terms of efficacy, and probably always will, but with the best warm white now being close to 80 lumens-per-watt, progress has been equally good." How soon until the breakthrough? Bob goes on to say that, "Most general lighting markets need warm white, and I think that we will need 100 lumens-per-watt in warm white to really crack those broad lighting markets."
Given the unslowing trend to improve the efficiency, the key threshold that has been a principle "gating element" is about to be met (100 lm/watt). From there, the business cases begin to expand, adoption criteria are satisfied, adoption begins, volumes rise and prices drop. History is no longer just telling us that suitability is soon and large scale adoption can follow, but that suitability is on us and we're about to find ourselves on the adoption curve that we've all been watching for. The conquering history of LEDs in the first wave of applications is bearing witness to 2009 being positioned to mark "the year it really began" for the second wave of LED adoption.
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