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Sapphire Material Market to Grow Past $400 Million in 2012
CompoundSemi News Staff
October 2, 2008...Research firm, Yole Development of France has release a report outlining the sapphire electronic application business.
The company report predicts that the sapphire material market for electronics will surpass $400 million by 2012. Yole points out that sapphire material is mainly used for two applications in the electronics market, gallium nitride (GaN)-based LED and RF switch devices for mobile phones.
Yole says that the sapphire substrate market for electronic applications has reached a volume of 4.61 Million wafers including (2” equivalent) for LEDs and several 10’s of thousands of 6” wafers for SoS RF applications in 2007. Yole predicts that the sapphire material market for electronics will grow at a 21 percent annual growth rate to reach $402 million by 2012.
According to the company, nitride LEDs has been the main driver of growth in the market with a 15 percent CAGR for several years to $100 million in 2007.
Yole indicated that in 2007 the revenue for SoS at the substrate level was in the below the $35 million range, but it is expected exceed $100 million in 2011.
With prices for 2-inch substrates down to $17 per wafer in Asia, companies are looking elsewhere. Demand for 4-inch wafers is reportedly booming. Big players such as Showa Denko and Samsung are moving to 6-inch wafers, the company said. Monocrystal appears to be ahead in the bigger wafer development after a demonstration of 8-inch c-plan sapphire. Yole Development Flyer
Cree Makes XLamp MC-E LEDs Available; Technology on Track for Incandescent Replacement
Scott McMahan
September 30, 2008...An LED maker based in Durham, North Carolina USA, Cree, Inc., announced the commercial availability of the XLamp MC-E LED. Cree says that the MC-E is the highest-lumen LED in the award-winning XLamp family. The multi-chip XLamp MC-E has the same 7mm x 9mm footprint as Cree's existing XLamp XR family LEDs. However, the company says that it provides four times the light output of the existing XR-E. Cree boasts that this is the highest lumen output commercially available for a package of its size.
Cree says the MC-E is designed to enable new applications and reductions in overall system cost compared to other LED packages. At 9.8W, the XLamp MC-E LED provides up to 790 lumens at 6000K (80.61 lumens/W) and up to 605 lumens at 3000K (61.73 lumens/W).
The CRI for cool white and neutral white (3,700 K - 10,000 K CCT) is 75. CRI for warm white (2,600 K - 3,700 K CCT) is 80. Each LED chip in the four-chip package is individually addressable.
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Carmanah Gets $1.2 Million Order for Solar LED Airfield Lighting
LIGHTimes Staff
September 30, 2008...Carmanah Technologies of of Victoria, British Columbia Canada has received a follow up order through Dubai-based GeSolar, the company's authorized aviation distributor in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to supply additional solar-powered portable airfield lights for civilian airfield applications. The latest order is valued at more than $1.2 million. According to Carmanah, the portable airfield lighting provides enhance visibility and safety at remote airfields using stand-alone LED lights.
The order includes Carmanah A704-5 runway edge lights, approach lights, and threshold lights, as well as A601 taxiway lights, mounting hardware, and wireless handheld radio remote-control equipment.
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Showa Denko to Open Taiwan Subsidiary for LEDs
LIGHTimes Staff
September 30, 2008...Showa Denko (SDK) of Japan reports that it is establishing an office in Taiwan to promote sales of its LED chips. The office will be located in Taipei City Taiwan. The wholly owned subsidiary will be called Taiwan Showa Denko Electronics Co., Ltd. The company will reportedly invest about US$10 million in the opening of the new subsidiary. The company contends that demand for SDK's LED chips is growing steadily in Taiwan for incorporation into LED lamps. Showa Denko says that with the establishment of the new subsidiary, it will strengthen its customer support and meet market needs. The company offers a full line of what it calls ultrabright LEDs. It reportedly sells LEDs covering the wavelengths of ultraviolet to infrared. The company notes that its red blue and green LEDs can be used in the production of high quality video display panels. SDK also offers what it calls high-brightness LEDs (what the industry refers to as power LEDs). The company said that the office will begin operations in November. Showa Denko K.K. News Release
Crystal IS Hires New CEO to Lead Company into LED Market
CompoundSemi News Staff
September 29, 2008...Crystal IS, Inc. of Green Island, New York USA , a supplier of single crystal aluminum nitride substrates, has hired Dr. Steven Berger as president and CEO. Crystal IS reports that it recently utilized its aluminum nitride substrates to develop deep ultraviolet LEDs. The company says that after demonstrating significant performance improvements from the use of its low dislocation substrates, it is almost ready to take the deep UV LEDs to market.
Crystal IS says that Dr. Berger’s experience of bringing new products to market during his most recent role in the FEI, a electron microscope manufacturing company, will greatly help Crystal IS make the transition to becoming a commercial supplier of deep UV LEDs. The deep UV LEDs will operate at 265nm, what the company say is the peak germicidal wavelength. The company says it will target the water and air disinfection markets, and the LEDs will be available in 2009.
During his 10 years at FEI, Steven reportedly helped bring new products to market profitability in his positions as chief operating officer and chief technology officer. There he was part of the executive management team that grew FEI from $150M to over $600M in revenue. Prior to joining FEI, Steven was a technical manager at AT&T’s Bell Labs. He also taught at Cambridge University, UK, after receiving his PhD from the Cavendish Laboratory. Crystal IS News Release
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Energy Star for Solid State Lighting Goes Live
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
October 2, 2008...It's another step in the right direction for LED lighting! The US Department of Energy announced on Tuesday that:
“...the ENERGY STAR Solid-State Lighting program is now effective. On Wednesday, September 23, 2008, the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) formally adopted LM-80-2008, "Approved Method for Measuring Lumen Depreciation of LED Light Sources." With the approval of LM-80, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has in place all of the industry recognized test procedures needed for qualifying products as ENERGY STAR. IESNA will publish the final version of LM-80 in the coming days.
"The next step for DOE is to help manufacturers get ENERGY STAR qualified products to market. To help manufacturers navigate the qualification process, DOE has created a "Manufacturer's Guide for Qualifying Solid-State Lighting Luminaires." [PDF will download into a new tab or window]. This document outlines the performance benchmarks that ENERGY STAR qualified products must meet, identifies testing facilities approved to conduct ENERGY STAR testing, and establishes the protocols manufacturers must follow to submit this information for approval. This document is designed to complement the ENERGY STAR SSL Criteria version 1.0 [loads into yet another new tab/window]....”
(As a side note, don't bother to head towards the Energy Star website to find those two documents. If they are there, they are well hidden and you might end up staring at the EPA's version of the "Residential Lighting Fixture (RLF) version 4.2" which is the deficit "evil half-spec" that we are all expecting to be rescinded once the silly season passes and the Office of the Inspector General completes their investigation into the EPA's negligence and ill-intent... Consider that my politically correct version of the story).
With the official activation of the real Energy Star criteria, it would seem fitting to call this phase of the SSL industry timeline, "Accountability Version 1.0". There are two big deals involved in this. First, there is LM-80, which provides a finalized, recognized spec for the LED industry through which the useful lifetime of an individual LED can be predicted. No doubt it isn't perfect, and there will continue to be debate on whether 70% lumen depreciation is the best "magic number", but when are such debates new for any technical specification? It's a tool, it will work fairly predictably, and when holes make themselves apparent, there will be adjustments and revisions to make the tool even better. With LM-79 in place, there will effectively be a single methodology for an LED manufacturer to spec its product lifetime, which levels the information field for the module and luminaire manufacturers.
The second big deal in the Energy Star criteria will be the requirement for luminaire manufacturers to validate their efficiency claims. They have had the opportunity to do so for some time, but as an industry, the push should be on to get onto the Energy Star list simply to prove you can back up your datasheet claims for overall performance and product lifetime. It will only take a few companies having "made the grade" in order to really begin the industry branding message that Energy Star will initially imply. Version 1.0 here is more about quality and living up to expectation, than about performance. That's pretty easy to figure out based on the fact most of the criteria are based on efficacies of 24-29 lumens/watt, compared to the CFL incumbents that are running around 60 lm/w. The "tough" criteria are reserved for the downlights, that set the bar at 35 lm/w.
All that seems easy enough to meet, given that state-of-the-art warm white LEDs are currently exceeding 60 lm/w, but there are still a few areas the module and luminaire manufacturers need to catch up on. In the just-released Round 6 CALiPER testing, out of something like 23 products, only 3-4 would currently qualify for this current category A Energy Star spec. You can get the detailed downloads that include the specific products by agreeing to the DOE's "no commercial use" policy (aka, the "no knocking the competitors using this data" rule). Virtually all met the efficacy standards, most met the CCT and CRI requirements, and something like, oh... virtually none met the power factor spec for commercial applications, with a few barely sneaking in at the residential level.
It would lead one to believe that there is something inherently incompatible between power factor and LEDs, except one downlight on the list managed to pull a .99. For the residential builders and users who might be new to this consideration, power factor is simply how much of the power that is fed to an electrical device is consumed by the device. The excess is pretty much pure wasted energy (unlike the waste heat from an incandescent bulb that at least heats up the house a bit in the non-summer months...). It also causes power companies headaches because low overall power factors cause a whole series of challenges for them... not only do they have to supply more energy than the user actually pays for, but they also have to compensate to clean the power back up as the low power factor devices send the equivalent of out of phase waves back down the line (if you've seen a an area where different sets of waves converge along a shoreline, you get the idea). For commercial users, power companies will often charge extra for power factors below .90. Consequently, SSL manufacturers have a goal of exceeding .90, not just to meet the Energy Star criteria, but to bolster their sales pitch versus CFL which are notoriously bad when it comes to power factor. CFLs are typically running around a .5 power factor, so a commercial building that has replaced the bulbs in the downlights is probably not enjoying as much savings as the simple reduction in "wattage" would seem to imply. A quick glance at some utility company rate sheets suggests that when the power factor moves below .9, they'll adjust the bill up by whatever percentage below .9 that the real facility power factor is. If that's a stack of CFLs causing the problem, their .5 factor will up the operating cost per bulb by 45% or so. There's some incentive to pitch a well-designed LED solution!
Maybe for "Industry Accountability version 2.0", in addition to meeting the next big milestone of 70 lm/w, maybe we can get a little pressure applied to the incumbents so they have to meet identical standards for simple things like efficiency, CCT and power factor in order to keep their Energy Star mark. Just a thought.
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