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Lighting Science Group Gives Further Reasoning Behind Acquisition of Lamina
Scott McMahan
July 31, 2008...Govi Rao, chairman and chief executive officer of Lighting Science Group, indicated in a recent telephone interview that LSG saw several technical and strategic advantages for acquiring Lamina. He said that the company wants to have the ability to make high power, high brightness light engines with integrated optics, without being at the mercy of LED and package suppliers.
Rao said that one of the key technologies that it gains from the acquisition is Lamina’s heat management systems.
Additonally he said that the company has a “... robust and sustainable supply chain.” He noted that “the quality, the people skills, and the people know how” are an additional benefit of the deal.
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Market Adoption of LEDs for General Lighting to be Faster Than U.S. Government Predicts, Darnell Group Says
LIGHTimes Staff
July 29, 2008...The Darnell Group, a market research firm based in Corona, California USA, reports that the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) prediction that the adoption of LEDs for general lighting will take place over the next 20 years is somewhat pessimistic. Darnell outlines its predictions for the LED lighting market in the report entitled, "LED Driver ICs: Application Drivers, Technology Developments & Product Introduction Trends." The report offers a roadmap of applications that it predicts will push growth for solid state lighting between now and 2020.
The company does acknowledge that the LED luminaires are at least two orders of magnitude away in the price (100 x the price of) from traditional light sources. The report from the Darnell Group says that in the near term, the number of LEDs used in typical applications will increase. Then, in the long term, the LED driver market is expected to go “full circle” from driving a small number of LEDs in handsets today to larger numbers of LEDs as backlights in various LCD applications. The the company predicts that LEDs in the next stage of evolution will more often be used in platforms such as automobiles and larger video displays.
The company says that, the growing number of LEDs will reduce the cost of LEDs dramatically until they become cost effective for general lighting.
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Lighting Science Group Gains Additional Packaging Capabilities and Brands with Lamina Acquisition
LIGHTimes Staff
July 29, 2008...Lighting Science Group Corporation (LSG), a leading solid state lighting solution provider, reported that it has acquired all of the assets of Lamina Lighting.
LSG also reported the completion of a $20 million credit line from the Bank of Montreal, of which $4.5 million is allocated for the cash portion of the Lamina Lighting purchase. According to the acquisition agreement LSG may also make “earn-out” payments to Lamina of up to $10.5 million in the second quarter of 2010. The amount of any future earn-out payments will be determined based on 85% of the 2009 sales of Lamina products and certain components developed by Lamina, subject to certain adjustments.
Lamina posted revenues of $2.1 million for the first six months of calendar year 2008. LSG reportedly acquired all inventories, accounts receivable, property and equipment and intellectual property of Lamina, and assumed all accounts payable and certain other accrued liabilities.
"Today’s acquisition further strengthens our product portfolio and gives us access to an integrated platform of products with an established global supply chain," said Govi Rao, chairman and chief executive officer of Lighting Science Group. "The combination of LSG and Lamina provides significant opportunities to leverage complementary product platforms and market segments, and offers international cross-selling opportunities. The acquisition of Lamina strengthens our current OEM relationships, and enables us to broaden our range of light engines and module offerings with fully-integrated solutions coupled with extensive technical knowledge."
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Anchorage Joins Cree's LED City Initiative
LIGHTimes Staff
July 29, 2008...Cree, the Durham, North Carolina-based LED lighting maker, reports that Anchorage, Alaska USA, has announced its participation in Cree’s LED City program. Cree’s LED City program is an international initiative that promotes the adoption of energy efficient LED lighting.
Other municipalities that have already committed to Cree’s LED City program include: Raleigh, North Carolina; Toronto, Ontario; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Austin, Texas; Tianjin, China; Torraca, Italy.
Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich announced the city’s participation in the initiative in conjunction with another energy-related plan calling for the retrofit of all 16,000 municipal roadway lights with high-efficiency LED fixtures. “I am pleased to announce the appropriation of $2.2 million to enable the city to purchase LED fixtures to change out roughly one-quarter of Anchorage’s streetlights,” noted Mayor Begich.
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Seoul Semiconductor Introduces High CRI Top View LEDs
SSLDesign News Staff
July 24, 2008...Seoul Semiconductor has release a new line of top view white LEDs with high color rendering indexes (CRI). While many companies have released efficient white LEDs with efficacy of 70 lm/W and higher, Seoul Semiconductor is among the first in the industry to release a white LED that has a CRI above 90. The company’s new top view LEDs are operate at 70 lm/W and last an estimated 50,000 hours. Seoul Semiconductor's new Top View LED series includes: the Warm White part (CAWT722-S), which has a CRI of 96 and achieves 68 lm/W and the Pure White (CWT722-S), which has a CRI of 92 and produces 70 lm/W. LIGHTimes SecondPage members login for more. Guests can view membership details.
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LED Lighting - The Eyes Have It
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
July 25, 2008...It's about more than the numbers. While great progress has been made in the specifications that will help designers, architects and consumers to select LED-based solid state lighting solutions, there's still more to this than meets the eye. Or rather, it's about what really does meet the eye, as opposed to what the spec sheet tells you. Anyone who knows me will confirm that I'm a numbers guy, so this concept has been one I wrestle with. I'm reminded of the vintage Star Trek episode, Spectre of the Gun (fear not, I actually had to look up the name), in which Captain Kirk and the key crew members are beamed into a representation of old Tombstone, Arizona for a showdown with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday at the OK Corral. They brew up a tranquilizer gas that should work, but doesn't. While the team struggles with another way out, ever-logical Spock points out that reality demanded that the gas will work. Since it did not work, he points out, reality is not the operating rule, and therefore, none of it is real and the Earp's bullets won't matter either. And he was right. (And not to leave anyone hanging, once they believed in unreality the bullets passed right through them, allowing a fair fist fight to ensue, mercy to be shown, and the basic merits of the human race were once again demonstrated to some further-advanced alien culture).
The 'dose of unreality' that brought this all to mind came yesterday when I had the privilege of a hands-on test of the new Samsung SP-P400B, which is built around Luminus Devices "photonic lattice" or "PhlatLight" LED array. Fear not, lighting folks, this isn't a pocket projector product review, it's a metal halide versus LED slap-down match. After stringing some wires and giving a quick read to the user manual to figure out how to make the picture pretty, we got this all-new, just now available "150 ANSI lumen" juggernaut to display a DVD playing on the laptop. The more observant spec-hounds will notice the still-common ANSI reference and point out that the specifications relating to the measurement of lumens – ANSI/NAPM IT7.228-1997 and ANSI/PIMA IT7.227-1998 – were officially retired on July 25, 2003, due to lack of technical support. CIE lumens are now the real standard, but the lumens come up the same. It's a big hint for everyone that the ANSI spec is still more commonly referred to in at least the projector marketing community - the efforts to maintain one's investment in educating the consumers can outweigh a lot of other factors.
The projector itself is only about a 6 x 6 x 3-inch cube, and about 1/4 or less the size of our 2000+ lumen company "presentation projector" that throws enough light to do the job for a conference room of up to 300 or so people (you can see both projectors up close and personal at the upcoming SSLdesign Summit, Aug 26-27 in New Jersey... where, along with our other great speakers, Luminus will share some "out of the box" approaches to general lighting based upon the same technology). With the LED illumination source in there, it has a nice, quiet fan, and more importantly for anyone who has experience the joys of traditional metal-halide projector bulbs, an ill-timed bump while in transit or especially while running, is not going to frag things and leave you with a rather immediate need for a $250 to $350 bulb. The LED solution is also projected to give you a lifetime of 4 to 10 times that of the metal halide. As you would expect the colors are brilliant in comparison to the larger projector's, and here's the reality-challenged part: It seemed every bit as bright despite the 10x disadvantage in its lumen rating. Do my eyes deceive me? Even if it is really only half as bright, making it a 5x disadvantage, there's a spec problem here.
One industry-insider that I shared this with commented, "It looks like the industry is starting to realize – and as you have observed in your 'testing', ANSI Lumens don’t predict perceived brightness comparisons between LED and lamp based projectors, and the disparity between LED and lamp ANSI ratings for equivalent perceived brightness is astonishingly large. Just as CRI is an inadequate predictor of perceived color rendering for saturated (RGB) white light sources, white ANSI lumens are not good predictors for LED projector performance. Bulb-based metrics are certainly inadequate for the move to SSL, but change is hard…" [emphasis added]. Color temperature (CCT) specs are another area that highlight the discrepancies, and are the subject of one standards effort underway, in addition other recently completed ones from Dr. Yoshi Ohno's group at the US's National Institute of Standards (NIST).
What this means for the general lighting community is that while the continual refinement of the specs will be helpful in any number of ways, it will still come down to understanding where the specs reach their limit and when our eyes have to take over. Jeff Miller, one of our 2008 Summit co-chairs, who is a director with Pivotal Lighting Design, as well as the current president of the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD), gave a spectacular workshop and talk at our supply-chain oriented Blue 2006 conference in Taiwan. In that talk, Jeff shared the "human factors" that needed to be considered and that are sometimes forgotten by the "semiconductor specification orientation" of the LED community. Things like "acceptable levels of contrast" and the understanding of "a daylighting approach" matter greatly when it comes to the user's lighting experience, comfort and even health. That's part of what the SSLdesign Summit is about, of course, as we've created an agenda that will enable specifiers and luminaire manufacturers to come away with a sharpened knowledge-base to enable them to qualitatively evaluate and implement their designs, whether at the fixture or lighting project level. The networking time will also connect them to key solution enablers to help them get it done (both in the form of people and technology).
Change is hard, but it's always worth the effort, and usually successful if you have the knowledge to make it work for you.
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