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Dialight to Acquire BTI Light Systems; Dialight StreetSense LED Street Light Certified as Qualified Product by DesignLight Consortium |
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LED Retail Light Maker, NUALIGHT LTD., Gets €9M in Funding
SSLighting Design News Staff
April 29, 2010...Nualight Ltd, a maker of LED lighting for the retail sector based in Cork, Ireland, has received €9.1m in a funding round lead by
Climate Change Capital Private Equity (“CPE”).
CPE subscribed for €3.75 million (of ordinary and preference shares) in a €4.1m round alongside existing shareholders and committed a further €5m jointly with existing investor ESB novusmodus, the renewable energy investment fund of ESB, the Irish State electricity company. Other investors include 4th Level Ventures, an early stage technology fund and existing shareholder.
Nualight’s LED light fixtures illuminate display cases in international food and high-end retail chains. The company's supermarket customers include Tesco plc, Switzerland’s Migros and Co-op chains and Rewe in Germany. Nualight also supplies leading global companies under private label contracts.
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Drive to Make Consumer Products Smarter About Energy Consumption and California Smart Electronics Act Bill
Scott McMahan, SSLightingDesign News Editor
April 26, 2010...California, a U.S. state which is often at the forefront of establishing environmental and conservation laws and regulations, is home to a Representative Michael Honda of the state legislature. Michael Honda, a State House Representative of California District 15 introduced a bill to make consumer electronics smarter in terms of energy consumption and conservation. The bill called, the "Smart Electronics Act" H.R. 5070. which was introduced last week, hopes to add energy consumption management methods and technologies to individual consumer electronic devices.
Marvell Semiconductors supports the bill. Sehat Sutardja, Chairman, president and CEO of Marvell Semiconductors, Inc. stated, "Every year, people around the world consume energy from billions of new electronic products—from smartphones, to tablet computers to televisions. All our efforts to make energy consumption more efficient through 'smart grids' and 'smart meters' are wasted if we still have dumb products. The Smart Electronics Act is landmark legislation that will ensure that those new products are more energy efficient and earth-friendly, reducing our resource demands and carbon footprint for generations to come."
From lights that stay on when no one is around, to DSL and WiFi routers that are always on, to to clock's, stereos, microwaves, and other consumer electronics, all these devices can put a invisible drain on electric power consumption. Many of them do so even when in the "Off" state. Many devices are obviously "dumb" electricity hogs, or at least "dumb" electricity sippers.
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Visible Light Upgrades Old Town Albuquerque's Historic Gas Lamps With LEDs
SSLighting Design News Staff
April 27, 2010...Old Town Albuquerque fits its name. Many of the buildings were made in the Spanish Colonial style. Its historic gas lamps fitted with 100 and 200-watt bulbs gave it an old-world charm. In the city which was founded in 1706, a central plaza and church is surrounded by homes and businesses. The lighting in turn of the century gas lamps got an upgrade with LEDs. Albuquerque Mayor Richard J. Berry and Visible Light Solar Technologies, a maker of LED and solar lighting applications, switched on the first installation of historic Old Town Albuquerque gas lamps retrofitted with LED and solar technology. The retrofitted lights consume just 21 or 42 watts.
The company says that many of the retrofitted gas lamps will incorporate solar cells, which were designed to be invisible to the multitude of visitors who tour the historic neighborhood each year. industrial-grade mica superstrate renders the solar panels invisible to the naked eye.
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Automotive Supplier Hella to Expand in North America and Offer LED Street Lights
LIGHTimes News Staff
April 26, 2010...Hella, a Germany-based producer and developer of LED lighting for cars, plans to increase production volumes in Mexico. The company also says that it will start a line of non-automotive products including LED-based street lights.
Dr. Martin Fischer, president of Hella Electronics Corporation and the head of the company’s Corporate Center USA in Plymouth Township, Mich., at the annual SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) World Congress in Detroit said that Hella expects to increase its electronics business in North America at an annual rate of 20 percent over the next three years.
Fischer predicted that demand for more fuel-efficient cars and light trucks will spark additional sales for its electronic components.
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Lighting Sciences Group Expansion to Hire Former NASA Employees
SSLighting Design News Staff
April 26, 2010...The CEO of Lighting Sciences Group Inc., Zach Gibler got to meet with President Obama at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, according to a recent news release.
NASA Kennedy Space Center was an appropriate place for the visit.
The company already has pending research grants to develop LED lighting for the International Space Station and develop LED lighting for NASA's space program.
The Florida-based company has been a poster child for USA's LED fixture and module manufacturing. The company received $18.8 million in federal economic stimulus bonds from Brevard County. LSG plans to use the money to relocate to a 100,000 square-foot facility primarily to serve commercial customers.
The company also plans to take advantage of the lay-offs as NASA downsizes after NASA ends the shuttle program.
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Commentary & Perspectives...
Driving down the costs - Part 1
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
April 29, 2010...One of the common questions we get from those outside of the "chip head" side of the industry is, "Why don't they just make the LEDs (and/or solar cells) cheaper? It can't be rocket science." Well, actually, part of it is, or nearly so, and others parts are driven by the economics including "economies of scale" that everyone is always so knowledgeable about. Make no mistake, we'll get there, but it is a process of innovation that will follow an evolutionary path, helped along with some occasional breakthroughs. In the first of this two-part commentary, we'll cover what's happening to move those costs down at the bottom and in some detail at the top of the chain, with Part 2 aimed at the middle and fleshing out that view from the top a bit more.
Materials and reactors... It all starts, not surprisingly, at the bottom. For those coming from a higher level of the food chain, the simplest analogy the industry offers is that making semiconductors is like making a pizza. You have a crust, called a substrate, that everything is layered on. Then comes the sauce, which is a blend of just the right main ingredients, and little added "spices" that make it unique to the particulars of the kind of pizza you're making. That sauce is the "epitaxial layers" or simply "epi". In this case, you cook it while you add the secret ingredients that make up the sauce, and what you get at the end is an "epi-wafer". Some of the ingredients manufacturers blend include gallium, indium and arsenic (called "source metals"), along with other ingredients, which are basically vaporized and then showered very precisely over the sapphire or silicon-carbide substrate in big things called epitaxial reactors. The most common of the volume production techniques is to use MOCVD, or metal oxide chemical vapor deposition. Taken one word at a time, the name is actually pretty sensible.
Those machines are not cheap, running probably $1.5M to $2M+ each, nor are they simple. They use a lot of electricity and take a fair amount of time to get the layers just right. The rocket science in the machine itself is how to get exactly the right amount of everything even blended, across the whole substrate, on multiple substrates at a time, to tolerances in the range of hundredths of a millimeter. The objective is uniform coverage that minimizes the "defects" which may be holes, or cracks, or shortage or overages of elements in the material that's supposed to be there. How well you do at this step will set the stage for the overall yield, or "percentage of good devices" you get from a wafer. More is better, since you go to all the trouble, time and expense of getting the materials on there, you want every square millimeter to be useful. The reactors take time to do their job, take time to finish one run and set up for the next, and also need maintenance (as you can imagine, flowing a bunch of hot metals at high pressure take their toll on the equipment). There is also a need to purge out anything that's not part of the formula for any particular run, so changing from one color LED, or efficiency level of a solar cell, to another, takes time to clean the previous formula's leftovers out.
Improvements are happening, and while incremental, they are noticeable. A few years back, at one of our Blue conferences in Taiwan, currently the larger of the "Big 2" when it comes to our world of non-silicon epi-reactors, Aixtron, was sharing the migration path to larger wafer sizes. In the simplest context, edges are useless for putting devices on, and the larger the wafer, the lower the ratio of "useless" edge to "useful" interior. A move from 2-inch to 4-inch, and then 4- to 6-inch wafers can provide a substantial increase in the yield per square millimeter from each run if (big if) you can maintain the uniformity. Veeco has made a big push recently to clearly communicate its intention to drive the fabrication costs, from the substrate through a device ready to packaged, down by a factor of 4 by 2015. According to Jim Jenson, Veeco's VP of Marketing for their MOCVD business, these reactors, and their accessories, currently make up about 50% of the capital expense of an LED fab. Their model K465i, introduced in January, has brought in a new approach to the deposition nozzle (technically, their "uniform flow flange") that has enabled a whole bunch of things to get better all at once. Jensen claims that their customers have seen yield improvements from what has traditionally been in the mid-70% range to something more in the 90's with this update. That represents just a yield-based cost reduction of 20-25%. Yield improvements ripple through the whole LED manufacturing process, as a higher percentage of good devices means that for the same amount of work at each step (such as fabrication of the chips and testing), more LEDs get produced. Changes to the line have also shortened the time it takes to get a new reactor up to speed, with recent results being customers having being able to take delivery of one of the reactors, and fully qualify their process on it in just 2.5 months.
LEDs, the other rocket science... It wasn't that long ago that packaged "lighting quality" LEDs were running at $10 for 100 lumens, or 10-cents per lumen (remember, blue and white weren't commercially available until around 2002/2003). Announcements in the last few months have shown us 2-cents per lumen (Cree), then 1.5-cents (Bridgelux), and most recently less than 1-cent for warm white (Intematix, part of today's news). It's assured that Philips, Osram, Nichia and others out there aren't standing pat at 10-cents per, they just didn't happen to specifically promote the price in the their announcements. That's a factor of 10 decrease in something like 5 years. We'll discuss what's driving that in the next installment of this commentary.
Supporting components... Suffice it to say in Part I here that there's room for improvement in both drivers (which feed and control the LEDs) and power supplies (which feed the drivers). The capable and reliable ones aren't cheap, especially when it comes to the power supplies.
Integrated lamps and luminaires... When do we get a $5 LED lightbulb? Maybe never, but not because it can't be done, but rather because it won't make sense to. At some point, a product becomes "cheap enough" that mass market adoption proceeds simply because it is a better solution than what existed before. One of my continuing favorite examples to evaluate some of what is happening, and what we think will happen in this industry, is the progression of the PC market. Introduced in the early 1980's, they started out as $2000 tools, and $1000 toys. You had to really need one for business at $2000, and most mid-sized or larger companies were doing just fine on the "cost per terminal" with their existing minicomputers. Small businesses had nothing in the way of a computer, and couldn't afford the $50,000 to $100,000 or more for their few employees who would benefit. $2000 for the PC, plus another few thousand for what was likely custom software, was way better than paying an extra accountant $30K a year (back then) to do the math on paper. As the business-level machines came closer to $1000, the 20-50 seat installations began to make sense as well, and massive adoption proceeded. Later, $500 PCs put them in most of our homes, but did you notice, they didn't keep heading on down to $300, or less (other than rare deals, so super-strippers)? The distribution channel (retailers) couldn't make the money they needed at that kind of price, and having PCs in every consumer electronics store drove far more sales than a lower price (by mail order) every would. They hit the value point at $500 and have stayed there, with features and capabilities being added, rather than prices proceeding lower.
We can expect to see much the same approach in LEDs, and interestingly, there's a bit of a challenge picking what that number might be. We'll explore some of what is driving that for replacement lamps ("bulbs") and luminaires in the next installment. (Continue to Part 2)...
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