Well, the opinion was provided by none other than the distinguished Dr. Daniel Doxsee, General Manager, Nichia America (his title now better reflecting the responsibilities he's had for many years as "senior sales manager" in the lower key Japanese system of titles). It turns out that recognizing that there were plenty of non-capable 3mm and 5mm packaged devices out there, Nichia set out a while ago to build lighting-capable versions, and succeeded with their DS series. I had missed this, Bob had missed this, and it looks like a good chunk of the industry missed this. Since mid-2007 Nichia has offered a line of 3mm and 5mm packaged white and color LEDs that incorporate proprietary resin and other design features that get the heat out, stand up to the heat that's left, and last 40,000 hours at rated drive currents (or longer if you drive them more gently). Oh my. Soooo.... once again, we can't judge the book by its cover so to speak. Just as all LED luminaires or conventional power-LEDs are not created equal, neither are those proliferate dome-shaped small packaged chips. An illustratory slide is here, a lifetime curve is here and the specs for the product families are here and here (the first two PDFs may spur your Acrobat reader to install Japanese fonts... it's quick and easy). If a luminaire you're considering has 3mm or 5mm chips in it, approach with caution, but don't rule it out. If they selected Nichia devices, the manufacturer should be happy to share reassuring data with you.

Now back to the Luminus-Nichia story... It's actually not a very complicated story, but it may be one of the bigger developments in the LED and solid state lighting industries we'll see for this year. We already know that Nichia is one of the LED companies that knows what it's doing, most notably with its strong reputation for very consistent and efficient white LEDs. If you've followed the news here, or on LIGHTimes, our more supply-chain oriented news site, you will have seen news and commentary on Luminus Devices, mostly regarding their Phlatlight large photonic lattice vertical LEDs being applied as the light engines in DLP projection TVs, and most recently in the new generation of "pocket projectors". Up until recently, their story hasn't been about efficiency as much as it has been about putting out more, better or longer lasting light on the same or lower energy budget. Besides the better color and seemingly infinite lifetime of the projection TV product, they found other niches such as medical applications, where there was a benefit to great color rendering without heat in the beam (think "colonoscopy" and you can imagine the benefit).

On Feb. 2 Luminus and Nichia announced they had entered a cross licensing and manufacturing partnership (ref. coverage), as well as marketing agreements that taken all together, appear to define a very comprehensive relationship. What we would expect to see resulting from that would be some new products for both companies that reflect the obvious synergies. As Udi Meirav, Luminus CEO, commented to us, "Nichia is a fully accomplished partner that is good at every part of the LED equation. This partnership opens new ground as it enables both companies to pursue high-efficiency white LED applications with large monolithic chips." We didn't need to wait long to see an example of this synergy. On Feb. 17, Luminus announced its SST-90 packaged white LED (ref coverage), which delivers 1000 lumens while consuming only 10 watts at its nominal drive current. 100 lm/watt for a cool white LED is state-of-the-art from a handful of high quality LED producers. 1000 lumens from a single chip, while being driven at nominal levels, is new ground. And if the application calls for more brightness at the expense of some efficiency, a single SST-90 can deliver up to 2250 lumens at its maximum rated drive current. That's a unique capability that comes from a truly large chip (and at 9 square-millimeters, it really is large) that has lots of surface area from which to dissipate that normally component-killing heat.