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Taiwan LED Sales Rise Sharply on Strong Demand
LIGHTimes Staff
September 9, 2008...Sales of LEDs from Taiwan jumped 16.1 percent to US$771.3 million during the first half of 2008 compared to the same period a year ago, according to researchers at LEDinside in Taipei. Some analysts have suggested that the Beijing Olympics gave a significant boost to LED sales. Taiwan’s OptoTech supplied 44,000 LEDs in a 147 meter x 36 meter screen at the Beijing Olympics. At least 36,000 LED lamps lit up the translucent exterior of the enormous Water Cube where the swimming competitions took place. The Water Cube also had a gigantic LED screen measuring 30 meters x 200 meters. Opto Tech Corporation of Taiwan reportedly won a contract from Suzhou city government to supply LED lamps for the very large screen, LEDinside said. SSL Design PageTwo members login for more. Guests can view membership details.
Osram LEDs and Dellux Technologies' Luminaires to Light Tunnel in Germany
SSLDesign News Staff
September 9, 2008...Dellux Technologies, a lumiaire maker based in Canada, reports that in the fall of 2008, the “Thüringer Schmücketunnel” on the A71 will be the first tunnel in Germany and the longest in Europe to have LED light. Trials have already begun in one of the bores. Osram says each luminaire is equipped with its Golden Dragon LEDs. Dellux Technologies says it has developed the luminaire specifically for tunnel lighting.
Dellux patented what it calls its LED Degradation Compensation technology that reportedly boosts the lifetime of the LEDs up to 130,000 hours while maintaining the same light levels. This translates to what the company says is a minimum lifespan of 15 years. Dellux says its tunnel LED luminaire installed uses 30% less energy than the usual 70 W high-intensity discharge lamps.
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Philips to Help Give Electricians Course In LED Lighting Installation and Maintenance
SSLDesign News Staff
September 4, 2008...Philips announced that it is partnering with the training branch of the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) to give electricians an advanced course in installing and maintaining LED lighting. NECA’s training branch, which trains journeyman electricians, the National Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee (NJATC) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), will get guidance and training from Philips Solid State Lighting so that Electrician apprentices, journeyman and contractors will have highly marketable skills in the lighting market. NJATC is reportedly the largest apprenticeship and training program of its kind with more than 300,000 apprentices attaining journeyman status. SSL Design PageTwo members login for more. Guests can view membership details.
Welland, Ontario Joins Cree’s LED City Initiative
SSLDesign News Staff
September 4, 2008...Cree of Durham, North Carolina USA announced that the Welland, Ontario Canada, has joined its LED City initiative, a program that Cree started to promote the use of energy efficient LED lighting. Welland, Ontario Canada has apparently been “going green” for some time now. In fact, back in December, the city manager won an award for an LED street light pilot program using Relume LED street lights. (Ref: article). http://www.solidstatelightingdesign.com/documents/articles/news/9360.html#top The city has reportedly converted many of its lighting applications to LEDs, including streetlights and traffic signals, and has additional projects underway. Welland has also amended its municipal standards to facilitate LED lighting for all future streetlight installations. SSL Design PageTwo members login for more. Guests can view membership details.
Albeo Technologies Selected as a GoingGreen Top 100 Winner
SSLDesign News Staff
September 4, 2008...Albeo Technologies, a provider of LED lighting products for industrial and commercial applications, was chosen to be an AlwaysOn GoingGreen Top 100 Winner. Albeo makes a variety of luminaires for industrial and commercial applications including cove lighting, bay lighting, under cabinet lighting, and toffer lighting. The Boulder, Colorado USA-based company was recognized for the creation of new business oportunities in green technology industries. Albeo was reportedly specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and other industry experts spanning the globe, based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz. SSL Design PageTwo members login for more. Guests can view membership details.
Avago Files for $400 million IPO
LIGHTimes Staff
September 4, 2008...Avago, a maker of compound semiconductor devices including LEDs has filed a registration statement with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to make an initial public offering (IPO) of its common stock. The proposed maximum aggregate offering price is $400 million. The IPO was on August 29, 2008. The company is listed on the NASDAQ under the stock symbol "AVGO". The offering is being made through Deutsche Bank Securities, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Citi, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Banc of America Securities, and KKR.
The company has initial public offering, but it is by no means new to the business. It had its roots as a division of HP. Then it spun out to become Agilent Technologies. Then in the later part of 2005, it was acquired by KKR and Silver Lake Partners, and became an independent company. The company has reportedly amassed an intellectual property portfolio of more than 2,000 issued and pending patents. Its key strengths include solid state lighting, LED lamps, and displays, in addition to cellular phones, data networking & telecom, equipment printers, optical mice enterprise storage and servers, consumer appliances industrial feedback sensors & motor controllers, auto signaling & dashboard illumination, LCD & plasma televisions.
Company Website: http://www.avagotech.com
Arkitema and Arkthing Win Design Competition for Icelandic Opera House
SSLDesign News Staff
August 28, 2008...Arkitema and Arkthing won a design competition with its design for the Icelandic Opera House in Reykjavik. Arkitema and Arkthing’s winning proposal takes its concept based on the needs for a building to serve the Opera, the capital’s residents, the town of Kopavogur in Reykjavik, and the elves. Elves, you ask?.... It seems that the opera house will be built on a high point along Borgaholt-hill. According to Icelandic folklore, elves live in the hill deep underground. The homes of the elves are said to be dark from the outside, but they reveal a light crystalline structure on the inside. The Opera house was designed similarly with a heavy and massive lower floor level and a light and crystalline upper floor level. SSL Design PageTwo members login for more. Guests can view membership details.
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Commentary & Perspectives...
Summit 2008: What the industry learned
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
September 4, 2008...Wow. The feedback continues to come in, and the consensus is: Just what we needed, do it again soon. In case you missed the Solid State Lighting Design Summit 2008 in Weehawken, New Jersey, be sure to take a look at the final agenda so you have some context for what went down in the first-of-its-kind event. Sized for the kind of interaction that creates a real synthesis in idea-sharing, the Summit brought together industry thought leaders, pioneers, leading designers, lighting decision-makers and innovators from the across the solid state lighting eco-system (SSLdesign Summit... accept no substitutes...). The conference included an evening "showcase reception" at the conclusion of the first day that allowed attendees the kind of "hands-on" that both brought tangibility to the day's topics, and facilitated the "deal-making" discussions that often mark this kind of event.
Key to the success of the Summit was the fact it was an ongoing dialogue among key stakeholders, not just another series of sales-ish presentations on the latest fixture or newest developments in light-emitting technology. The audience heard from notable individuals in the design community, including IALD President (and conference co-chair, Pivotal Design's Jeff Miller, along with Matthew Tanteri and Leni Schwendinger, who shared insights into what makes lighting "design" tick, and what it achieves. For anyone who is not intimate with the elemental artistic nature of lighting design, it is a shock how little of it has to do with lighting sources, and how much of it has to do with the human perceptive experience. (Note: Lighting design is not to be mistaken as having to do with "luminaire design". The divergence is comparable to "painting" versus "paint manufacturing".) With so many of the additions to the LED-lighting product line-up coming from the electronics side of this new industry, and not from the lighting side, it's clear that there have been major disconnects in communicating the value proposition to the community that will be instrumental in driving SSL into the public eye. Better informing luminaire manufacturers and enablers on not just the needs, but on the designer's project perceptions, will prove to be a critical step in enabling the industry's growth.
And how is that growth proceeding? It's exciting, and consistent and, as the notes are compared, still in its infancy. Govi Rao of Lighting Science, reminded us all of how early in the adoption cycle we really are. As we hear about cities "moving to LEDs" for streetlights and parking structures (areas where the higher efficiency cool white is vastly superior to the poor-color rendering HPS or cold-weather challenged fluorescent incumbents), we can miss that it's still only 2 or 5 or possibly up to 50 fixtures that are being installed as the most basic proof-of-concept. Testing, validation, re-evaluation of the options and finally a procurement and retrofit installation process will take years for someplace like New York City.
By way of example, moving from the mini-computer to the PC in the early adopter finance and inventory management departments, where the business case was strongest, was far from an overnight process. Only after the hard lessons had been learned there, and the technology continued to evolve, did we hit the mass-adoption cycle that marks the real start of our collective "PC revolution" memory. Detailed discussions on "how much, how soon" were a big part of the roundtable discussion that wrapped up the two-day event. There wasn't much dissension that LEDs (including OLEDs) should be producing the vast majority of the world's lumen output by 2020. How many of those lumens would be LED-based by 2012 was the interesting part... the opinions ranged from "enough to show the impact" to "a surprising percentage".
A recurring theme that was designed into the format was, "What do you need to know to separate the wheat from the chaff?" and the questions to ask were covered on a number of fronts. The speakers were often very strong in their emphasis that designers/specifiers and decision makers should insist on seeing the photometric and other test data to back up manufacturer claims. That was a significant addition to the suitability checklist that has been more typically presented over the last few years, and not something the lighting decision-makers, especially in public works type applications, are used to doing. It's not a surprise that it has been added to the checklist, but more a natural outgrowth of fact that key standards and evaluation criteria are now in place, including IES LM-80, which provides luminaire-level performance criteria, and LM-79, which covers LED lifetime characterization.
Luminaire manufacturers took away nuggets on the breadth of the design support network available, modular types of solutions that can speed them towards a finished product, and again, the questions to ask their suppliers to separate the useful from the problematic. Optics enjoyed some time on the agenda, both standalone and as part of several luminaire discussions. We found out that there are indeed solutions that are bright enough today for recessed lighting, Troffers and wide-area industrial retrofits, including several case studies that highlighted the dramatic results from retrofits that are primarily providing better distribution of the light within the space. LEDs do that particularly well (light where you want it, and not where you don't). As part of the case studies, the audience also saw that the payback periods are now within a range that provides a strong business case, right now, with today's technology and efficacy. We were reminded that LED lighting is also a handy tool for the lighting design professional who finds themselves running out of power budget and having to give up creative opportunities within a project. Saving watts in uses that the more efficient fluorescents couldn't serve allows the addition of accent and decorative lighting that may have otherwise been pushed out of the project.
Fundamentally, there was agreement that LED lighting is on track, beginning to prove itself to the skeptics, and ready for primetime in a number of applications. There are still holes, both in how to separate the good stuff from the junk, as well as in the validity of the claims found in the spec sheets. Selecting an SSL partner is not for the faint of heart, but it's becoming easier to spot the winners as more hard data and industry specifications are becoming available. The Summit will be back soon, hopefully to a town near you!
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