Toshiba Lighttech, Sharp and Panasonics are the top three LED light bulb Makers in Japan

May 2010’s LED light bulb sales volume is 55 times more than the July 2009

GFK Japan 2 July announced of the LED sales volume in the home domestic stores in Japan.
The Sales volume of the LED light bulb is 55 times of the May 2009. Whereas the Sales amount is 48 times higher in the same period. Sharp, Toshiba Light, and Panasonics occupies most of the the sales amount of light bulbs.
The top sales item is the Toshiba’s LDA6N which was launched in 5 March.
Other three models fill up the 3rd, 8th and 10th top sales items. Sharp’s DL-L601N launched in 1st Aug 2009 was the 2nd place, Sharp’s DL-J40AL three models took up the 4th, 5th, and 6th position. 7th Position is Panasonics’ LDA7D-A1 and LDA6L-E17 is the 9th position.
The Adoption rate is high and I foresee another two digits growth in 2011.

Feverip

World Largest Giant Origami Solar-Powered LED Crane

This year’s Coachella music festival in Indio, could use- a giant origami crane at the entrance. And it’s lit up with LEDs and powered by a solar system. Built by LA-based Crimson Collective, the sculpture, called Ascension, was inspired by the Japanese tradition of folding a thousand cranes in order to receive a wish. Thousands of fans enter the festival where they will pass under its welcoming wings, and be part of the collective intention of the crane.


The bird weighs 35,000 pounds with a wingspan of 150 feet. Ascension is a 45 foot tall living art installation made out of modular aluminum tubes and covered with a white mesh fabric called Textilene. The Crane is lit up with thousand of HB LEDs…Another Magnificent decorative structure built by latest lighting technology….

Feverip

Wei Feng, The China No. 1 LED City

According to Latest Shan Dong news on the latest Wei Feng High Tech LED general illumination project was approved by China as the special National Grade Semi Conductor illumination as the First City. After Wei Feng City has been granted the Ten City Ten Thousand Lamp Project “十城万盏” last year. Which is the Only City was granted this approval in the Whole Shan Dong province.

Wei Feng has been support by these major LED players such as AOD (Advanced Optronic Devices China Co. Ltd 中微光电子, Inspur Huaguang Optoelectronics Co浪潮华光, Geortek 歌尔光电…Specially AOD who had spent effort in building those Street Lamp for Wei Feng City.

Wei Feng City has install 30,000 Street Lamps and will be attaining 100,000 Lamps in 2011 this ensure Wei Feng City will be the Hottest City For LED in China under the Ten City Ten Thousand Lamp Project “十城万盏”

Wei Feng City is one of the four fundamental programme in Shan Dong Province. And Shan Dong has a target to make Wei Feng to be the China LED City by supporting these Players such as Inspur HuaGuang and other LED manufacturers by incentives and numerous subsidization in land and power resources. And Government would like to further supporting from them and make Government is the largest buyer for the LED Street Lamps. Moreover other Cities are also spending millions for inverting for building LED factory using the best in the LED equipment in the industry for their LED manufacturing. I have seen one whole new factory in the South part of Shan Xiang that they have 400 acres of land with total investment of over 1 Billion of RMB in the factory, We soon will see their first LED street lamp and Back light unit will be rolled off from the production line in End of August.


Haier, a China giant of Air Con, Refrigerators and domestic Electronics appliance colossus in China is building their LED manufacturing line in Dong Ying City and that will soon be one of the major LED supplier in the Shan Dong area. Their initial product is the LED back light unit for Haier LCD TVs.
These are the recent city outlooks whilst I was there last week.
I am looking forward to see ing Wei Feng City to be the largest China LED City in 2011.

Feverip

LED for Volkswagen L1 EV Car.

Thomas Reiners, director of Application Technology for special lighting at Osram said, “Compact and efficient LED sources will be mandatory for low energy consumption especially the environmental friendly electric vehicles in the future in order to achieve the car industry’s CO2 objectives. A dipped beam headlight with these light sources will use less than 15 watts and therefore save 40 watts of power input per vehicle side compared with a halogen solution.”
With a power input of 19 watts per dipped beam, the one-liter car’s lighting is far more energy efficient today than conventional headlight solutions, in which mostly halogen lamps with 55 watts are used. Even Xenon lamps at 35 watts of input use 20 percent more energy on dipped lights (95 percent of nighttime driving) than two Joule JFL2 LED modules.
“Energy efficiency and ease of integration were good reasons to rely on LED solutions for headlights on our one-liter car. This technology is just as forward-looking as our vehicle,” said Henning Kiel, lighting engineer at Volkswagen. Replaceable LED light sources represent a genuine alternative to the lamps already available in the car industry.
Oct 27, 2009 Osram’s LED technology will contribute to the energy efficiency of Volkswagen’s L1 concept car, which according to Volkswagen can go into production in 2013, has headlights that are equipped with new Osram Joule JFL2 LED systems and matching reflectors. The LED modules take care of the dipped and main beam functions and consume far less energy than conventional headlamps. Joule JFL2 LED modules will be introduced in production in early 2010 and can then be included in new vehicle models easily and across multiple platforms.

US or European technology for LED is still leading the market aas in the niche market of Automobile, however, once the stringent automobile quality requirement has been qualified, and people has been seeing this kind of head Lamp running on the road for a few years, more and more cars are keen on using LED as their lighting solutions. Instead of acting as a sales gadget for top of the line model. more volume production model will be using LED the LED head lamp business will grow gradually. As who will be paying such a large amount of money to buy a car not using LED on your, LS430, 3.5TL, 750Li, Q7 3.6 Quattro, Bentley Continental, Porsche Panamerica, or a Cayenne Turbo?

Feverip

Audi A8 is using Osram Ostar LED for their head lamps and DRL

This is an Audi  R8 using Lumileds HB LED for their Hi and Lo beam Head lamps. taken on 9 July at Tsue Mun Sea food market.

 The A8 is built with Osram LED for Hi Lo Beam and DRL

Since Lumileds launched for the first time for their High Power LEDs on Audi Top of the line R8 in 2007, and Koito Head lamp using Toyoda Kosei LED on Lexus LS600Ih low beam Head lamp... Over the years they have been lighting up thousand miles of road by these two players in a lead LED application market.

However the revenue created was not too much as all, as Audi initially announced that they produced only 20 R8 cars a day using the best of Audi Technicians and Toyoda may not produce so many as on their top of the series Lexus LX600ih hybrid luxury sedan.

Now Osram is really entering into the major market of A8 as the luxury category. That is a good sign for such a move as Osram is the world 2nd and Europe largest package LED manufacturer, their power on manufacturing is yet to be seen. Osram is famous for their penetration of their LED into the Automobile industry, BMW, Mercedes Benz Audi, Volkswagen are using more r less LED from Osram.

Naturally they understand the importance of LED reliability for Automobile stringent product requirement.
Ostar LED family provides some of his hi-performance LED for head lamp of Audi A8, each unit of LED produces 160 lm at a current of 700 ma and say five of these unit will produce 800 lumens. Osram’s OSTAR headlamp is available as a new product platform with up to five LED chips, each with typical light values of 160lm at 700mA. Together, depending on the variant and operating current, 125–1100lm is achievable. With its scalable brightness, the OSTAR headlamp suits all headlamp functions such as low and high beams, cornering lights, fog-lamps and even daytime running lights, says Osram.

LED has an advantage over HID lamp as for their effective life time is much longer, they can be switched on and functions at highest lighting intensity within in 2 milli seconds which is critical for High speed at night. Their profile is thinner and easy for the car design, could be a kind of face lifting for the car. Power saving, an essential element for EV car.

Feverip

Sleek and Stylish LED Desk Top Lamp

This is a piece of desk top lamp with Cold White LED as the illumination and amber LEDs are embedded on top for decoration. very beautiful. I saw it in Pacific Place Lane Crawford.
It is selling at HKD$15,900.00!

Feverip

China will be the largest consumer market for LED SSL.

From World bank’s forecast regarding the GDP figures of US and China.
The forecast of China 's GDP will be approximately 50% of USA by 2015, and 70% by 2025, and the growth is an exponentially in the years to come. By 2050 China GDP will be about three times that of USA!
Base on this astonishing data China is well aware of their energy policy as it does not have enough neutual resources storage of crude oil, whereas USA has a lot of hidden oil under the ground.

China Government energy policy includes a lot of incentive programmes to promote the use of  greener energy to replace the oil. LED is one of the major technologies, besides wind has a lot of limitation in China as due t o the installation cost and availability of wind in hilly profile of central China, Solar has been accepted as one kind of green ernergy but during the manufacturing of solar cell, we have to use up a lot of water and electricity, thus this is not being of Green energy as compare with LED.
During the Kyoto Protocol, China has shown to the major advance countries that we have an aggressive target to reduce GHG (Green Houses Gases) of 45% by 2050 starts at  2017. It seems that China will be starting late for the reduction of emission but we have to understand that China is big country of 1.3B population across  thousand miles frrom Shanghai to Urumqi in the Western border.
We will have to spend effort, money and national incentive drive to ensure this programme to be enforced, but it might take years.
The 2nd supporting country is Japan... Refer to the attached chart of the Major committment of the rate of emission reduction... Look at US. In fact President Bush was the one to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in 2009. As for LED side, the price of a CFL light bulb in USA is about USD$1.0 to USD$5.0.,This is cheap and there is no imminent need for them to use a kind of LED which is almost 20 to 30 times more expensive kind of lLED ighting fixture.

China will be the manufacturing centre and likely the largest LED lighting consumer for LED by 2014. China LED will be our focus today and Tomorrow.

The so called "10 cities and 10,000 light project" was not successful as China Would expect in 2009 as the Amount and quality of light produced has failed to reach the levels generated by their mercury-vapour rivals, due problems of heat dissipation and power sources.

The 21 cities covered by the first stage of the project have also encountered with financing problems. The next stage of the LED streetlight project includes plans to have 2 Millions LED streetlights in 50 cities, given the government’s efforts to encourage demand for domestically-produced LED chips. China still lacks adequate up-streamed process technology, however, I speculate that in Q211 the situation will stabilize and gradually moving upwards and we will see more and more LEDs will be used for general illumination in Major City of China starting 2011 and onwards.

Forecast the growth of LED light-bulb market to peak in 2012-15, and market size of the LED light-bulb market to reach US$10bn in 2016.


China will be our focus for LED Solid State Lighting Market now and tomorrow. With the Continuous effort of major chip manufacturer like  recent Cree's advanced LED chip development, one would say why don't we mention about Osram and Philips's Lumileds?
As both Philips and Osram has the  intrinic burden of their huge traditional Incandescent lamp and CFL factories that is hard for them to close down. Take for example, LED lighting fixture of Philips groups is just account for 5% of their total lighting product currently.

Also we can not ignore the continuous effort of those world class LED assembly manufacturing equipment supplier that could produce equipment with higher throughput 30% more in two years time. The early adoption of LED Solid state light fixture would be in one day be seen everywhere in the major cities in China and at same time in the street of Shinjuku, Paris, Hong Kong, Frankfurt and New York...

Feverip

How to capture this business opportunity of LED Market 2009-2012?

1995-2005
Since 1995 the LED market has been demonstrating amazing double digital annual growth rates through the year 2004. The worldwide market totals over 5.8 billion US$ in 2005, in which the high-brightness HB LEDs take more than 15% of market share. The increase by now has been largely driven by the wide utilization of mobile devices such as mobile phones and smart phone during the last few years. The main applications included keypad and display backlighting for these devices. Due to the disruptive technology has been using in the past three years with smaller chip with higher Lumens per watt, we did not see much growth in the equipment demand on Side view LED. The Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese LED maker has almost zero demand on bonding equipment. That was partly due Mobile phone is not growing much at all, and at the same time the capacity for side view comes to a saturated state. They just do not need extra back end Bonding Equipment.
Although the growth of the mobile phone market has shown signs of deceleration. Other new applications of LEDs will provide new highlights for the market expansion in the next 5-10 years. The major foci of the industry will be the utilization of LEDs in the Back light for LCD TV, monitor, Note Book and net book, general illumination and the automotive lighting.


HP LED Market
The breakthrough in white LED products and Ultra high brightness (UHB) LEDs, which produces more than 20 lumen per watt (the light output of normal 100-watt incandescent lamps), make the utilization of LEDs in the general lighting and automotive lighting visible. As the UHB LEDs are approaching to the output level of 80 lumen per watt, which is the output of standard fluorescent lights, they will by and by replace the fluorescent bulbs in households, offices and other places around the world in the future, because they are energy saving, less pollution, have better light quality and have a 2.5X lifetime than fluorescents. Up to 2015, the market segment of general illumination is expected to reach US$ 5.5 billion worldwide.


Back Light Unit demand
From my estimation that from the small bass number of 3% of LCD TV Back light market, there will be about 30% market for LCD TV using Back light unit in 2010 and there will be likely 60% of LVCDTV using LED Back light in 2011. That is a huge growth for the LED demand in this hot market. The HB LEDs are currently a $5 billion niche market comparison to $250 Million Semiconductors we used to say “IC” market. The backlight unit sectors will exhibit the fastest growth in the HB LED market with an overall compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of ,more than 40%, led by the LCD TV Sector exhibiting a CAGR of 280% between 2008-2012.


Packaged LED cost Breakdown
The Diagram show the Cost Structure of the LED manufacturing, they consists of backend process like Laser Substrate removal, Chip separation, Chip Sorting through wafer mapping, Die bonding, Curing, Wire bonding, Phosphor application, curing, Lens Moulding by Compression Mould. Singualtion, Testing, binning and taping. Laser marking. This will take up 60% of the Total cost of the package LED.As far as MOCVD, front End such as die probing, sawing, film mounting, Substrate of the LED, MOCVD takes up about 8 percents of a packaged LED. With such fast growing LED market demand, MOCVD equipment like Veeco Instruments would have to produce 208 tools in 2009 up to 420 tools in 2011. This consensus forecast of 420 Tools represents a market of over $1 billion base on an ASP of $2.5 Million for one MOCVD.

Price, Lumens and Output
For a higher adoption of LED in various application, the key factor if price. So if one can product a low cost and yet powerful LED, he will win the maker.What a good question is who can have the major control of the Back end Process which is contributing 60% of the Cost of the LED… beside he could get a constant good supply of LED say from Nichia, Epistar or Cree…


Position your LED market
That is a important question to someone who runs the LED, to make a standard LED package as others people are doing? To start an unique process!? Or to follow the Big Player utilizing the low cost structure of your factory to squeeze a dime more out of the LED!?


Equipment Delivery
I think 95% of the package in China are alike, and they way of manufacturing are more or less the same only bigger company has a better equipment price and delivery negotiation with the major equipment suppliers. There is a seen trend s that the large corporation will be using his power to issue a letter of intent or a Blanket order for a few hundred machines to be delivered over the months of 2011.


The Smaller companies may have less room for them to get a better price, delivery will be poor too. I the past year equipment delivery varies in the range of 8-12 weeks, now we can get a delivery quote of 20-24 weeks of courser all depend on how good your relationship with the supplier and how strong your buying power is!?


Equipment Suppliers
In the past there is no on keep an eye on the LED business as they were used to be smaller than the “IC” business. Now as you can see LED is more 20X larger than the ICs’ so there is a lot of equipment supplier going into this market, people start to spin off from one big company for set-up his company to get the order. Naturally this is a technology world a bigger firm definitely has a better technology than those smaller company. However, the truth is copy cats in China it is as much as the Copy rats… that just do not care how the support and reliability is. So long there is similar performance of output accuracy; they will just lower down the price say less 30% to get the order. Since copy is almost free in design… their R & D cost is almost Zero. But the poor customers will not be too stupid now to buy after a while the reliability of their equipment, or even the LED it built would have a big issue. Gold is Gold…. The trend is that those big companies will buy from the world renown equipment supplier for their Equipment and the smaller one who refer to the big one to follow… as once they know their :LED products would prone to be rejected by their end customer . They will just kill themselves by the poor LED Quality.


Critical Process
A few years back, a 15 years IC wire bonder engineers told me that there is no high technology at all to make a straight up neck lopping wire on a VLED (Vertical LED) lamp at all. All kind of bonding equipment would more or less do the same job well! Later when he got his hands on the Machine in or to optimize a proper looping height of 25 mil high with wire sway allowable of +/-1 mil. He finally gave up and told me that was even harder to perform an IC bonding with more than 1,000 wires per chip. I use wire bonding stage as to tell that bonding equipment can product better LED.


Packaging of a LED
There are numerous ways to package a LED, no matter what power level.
PLCC base, Ceramic base, MCPCB etc, LED like 1mmx1mm or small down to 6 mil x 6 mil, going for Silver Epoxy as the traditional way, or Flux Eutectic, Flip Chip or the latest way to package using Direct Eutectic for UHB LED application. The cost structure of the LED should well be understood for your packaging. If that is a general back light application, There is no need to go for Eutectic, High density matrix type of PLCC would be best for the machine utilization.


In case you go for K2 type of HB LED manufacturing, traditional type of K2 Leadframe has only 20 units on a strip is not good enough as it would seriously jardpodize the Throughput at all processes. Some of the latest leadframe design has 140 units, that would improve the throughput of the UPH at least 2X at die bonding, and silicone lens moulding stage.

LED cost breakdown
This is a typical cost breakdown of a 1 watt LED with 1mm x1mm LED chip on ceramic Substrate with Dome lens on top of it.
The chip itself accounts for almost 80% of the total material cost of the whole LEDs. So if you package in such a way the chip yield could be 1% higher, than you can easily save up to $50,000.00 for a monthly output of 100 millions package LED with an assumption of $0.50 for each of the chip. So if you can package it in such a way with Higher output at various stage, the yield loss could be say 1% lower or Testing cost 10% lower by using a more cost effective testing equipment than your competitors,. There are a lot of process points that you can work on, when you calculate the overall saving per month, that can be millions of dollars. 


Equipment Selection
The trick is there are too many factors such as material variation and bonder parameters set-up plus the Software capability of the Bonder, all these will contribute on how good the Looping looks likes… Well to a jelly bean LED marker, there might not be having much difference. But of your final product will be ultimately be use insider An Audi, Toyota, Panasonic or Samsung LCD TV. That will be a different story.
Questions will be asked… hey what is the best back End equipment to be considered for me. I think you can verify the statement: “No.1 is the best?”… If that is a true statement, that you should consider follow top major players; Nichia, Osram, Cree, Lumileds, Avago, Everlight, Liteon for their equipment selection.


Technology takes it all
The U.S. DOE’s Solid Stats Lighting Manufacturing Roadmap Targets a factor of Two improvement in Cost-of-Ownership for Manufacturing equipment every five Years. From this basic rules apply, who can fall into this category with their major company who can meet this COO Road Map? That will be your designated list of major suppliers for your LED manufacturing.
Feverip

LED SSL year will begin in 2012-2014

Left to Right, 18W Incandescent Lamp, 3W LED G19 Light Bump, 100Watt W19 Incandescent Lamp

Back light unit is the major driver for the LED booming since Q2 09.
This is the fact that 2009-2012 would be the year of LED Backlight year.

How about the SSL? Are we trying to say that 2011-204 will be SSL LED Lighting?

Since Thomas Edison created the world’s greatest lighting invention Incandescent lamp 130 years ago, it has Luminous Efficacy of only 0.7%-5.1%. Cold Fluorescent lamp of power rating of 9-26W Luminous Efficacy is 9-11%. The LED Luminous Efficacy is 20-28%, it is highest amongst amount all, though many scientists are still working on for more.

Life Time of Incandescent lamp is 1,000 hours, and CFL 10,000-20,000 Hours. A good LED with proper thermal design would have a life time of 40,000-60,000 Hours.

The fact behind the scene is that people starts to refuse to use CFL as it contains mercury whihc creats heavy pollutions to the environment. We had no other better choice before, now we have the LED solution in a form of commercial commodities.

Recently, ClSA did 600 cases as a on line survey, they found that 80% of respondents are not willing to buy LED light bulbs unless retail price is lower than USD10.00. 70% would consider buying LED light bulb if their payback period is within 1 year.

Presently, the Retail sales price of 3W LED light bulb is HKD$80.00, an equivalent lighting intensity is the same as an 18W incandescent lamp. Assuming 10 hours/day and the saving on electric bill a year will be:

(18-3)x10x365/1000 xHKD$1.0-HKD$6.00= HKD$49.00

That is to say a 3W LED light bulb would take 1.5 years for payback.

Referring to the power measurement on LED replacement lamp and the T5 CFL tube found that the power saving is 24.9W

 Price of LED replacement tube is HKD$200.00 Vs Philips T5 at HKD$25.00 in Hong Kong.
With a power saving is 24.9W an hour.
24.9Wx10 hoursx365Days/1000x HKD$1.0=HKD$91.00
It takes about 2 years for payback.



What a Bright Idea to Change!

The LED replacement lamp was 40X more expensive than Incandescent lamp 2 years ago, now it about 10X . We can see that the ASP of LED replacement is dropping at such a rate that the payback time will be less than 1 year in 2012. Refer to the attach chart I plotted base on the average price of 3W LED G19 Light bulb.

Base on this rate the 3W LED replacement light bulb will be about HKD60.00 by end of the year and further reduce to HKD$40 in Q2 2011.

Under this estimation, we can see that the ASP of LED replacement is dropping at such a rate that the payback time will be less than 1 year in 2012. That will be a right timing for the SSL lighting to be truly becoming a commercial commodity, and could be displaying in the supermarket side by side with the CFL… and I am sure that the Incandescent lamp would becoming something collectible…

As a summary, I foresee that the SSL will be in the adoption rate of 10% in 2012 and gradually increasing from 15% in 2013 and 25% in 2014.

Feverip

The Future of Semiconductor Illuminator, by John Popovich at Column8.com

The Future of Semiconductor Illuminator, written by John Popovich, available at column8.com describes John’s 15 years development of LED illuminators, research and development on numerous novel substrates, optics, LED backlights, waveguides accomplished in a personal facility and an optoelectronics laboratory.



You can down load a PDF file of 130 pages on his studies on how to design a proper light guide, with educed cost, mass, and thickness and with greatly increased optical efficiency and brightness. A reference design for an edge illuminated 4mm thick 65” outdoor LCD is included. You may contact John directly for a commercial discussion on utilization of his technology and or LED light waveguide application consultancy.


Please Call John Popovich for more details

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130 South Cedros Avenue #170

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