China Changes to Taiwan LED makers

It is reported on June 11 that China plans to turn to Taiwan companies to put LED technology into street lights in 10 Chinese cities.

The project aims to cut electric bills in Chinese cities by using LED in city lights. LEDs give off less heat, consume less energy and last longer than traditional lights, according to China’s National Semiconductor Lighting Industry Alliance, which oversees the project to light up China with LEDs. The technology is also inexpensive because it’s used in a range of projects, from Christmas lights and the displays of alarm clocks, DVD players and digital music players, to the backlights in LCD laptop screens.

The agreement was part of deals signed at a two-day conference between LED industry leaders and government officials from Taiwan and China.

Delegates from the conference also signed a letter of intent to work together to promote LED technology, including in research, development, qualification and the creation of new standards. Over 200 Taiwanese companies and 71 Chinese companies took part in an exhibition related to the conference, and around 80 government officials from China attended the event, according to Taiwan’s economics ministry.

The cooperation highlights increased cooperation between Taiwan and China over the past year. A new president elected last year in Taiwan has pushed forward a number of initiatives to strengthen ties with China, mainly economic, a far different tack than the previous administration, which advocated Taiwan independence. China and Taiwan separated in 1949 amid civil war, and China has vowed to attack if Taiwan moves toward formal independence.

A number of new policies have been implemented by the new administration in Taiwan, including direct flights between Taiwan and China for the first time in decades and greater business ties between the two places. Another example in the high tech area was last week, when Taiwan hosted the first ever China pavilion at the Computex Taipei 2009 electronics show.

LED sales to China’s lighting industry stand to be big business for Taiwanese companies, according to investment firm CLSA Asia Pacific Markets in Taipei.

“The fast-growing economic growth in China will inevitably lead to urbanization and higher electric lighting consumption,” said analyst Andrea Su, in a report on Thursday.

She believes China will increase spending on LED lighting to lower energy costs and that currently, lighting consumption per capita in China is only 10 percent that of North America.

No Shadow LED Man

If you ever wanted to see what the phase shifting of a body going through a Star Trek transporter looks like in real life, you won’t do much better than the recent exhibit by Makoto Tojiki.

The artist created this LED light sculpture called “The Man With No Shadow” and showed off his work at the recent Salone Satellite event in Italy. Tojiki reveals little about his technical methodology, but the futurist bent of the work speaks for itself. You can check out more stunning images of the LED man here.

The LED Streetlights Could Drive You Crazy and Make You Fat?

This is a test on LED streetlight. During the day, the block of bungalows and houses at 22nd Avenue East and East Mercer Street looks like most of Capitol Hill. But at night, it looks crazy. This is one of seven test areas in the neighborhood where Seattle City Light swapped the high-pressure sodium streetlights, which emit a warm orange hue, with glaring LEDs. City officials want to replace all 40,000 residential streetlamps in Seattle with the new light-emitting diodes by next year to save energy and money. But the lights cast a sickening hue. “It is a very cold color—zombie blue,” says Dan Travers, who lives on the block. “My first thought was that people are going to look scary under these lights.”

“It looks like you are in a supermarket aisle,” says Andie deRoux, who lives in an apartment building seven blocks west of Travers. Abby Katzman, who has lived on the eastern slope of Capitol Hill for 20 years, says, “I like the energy it saves, but it does seem very cool and wintery.”

On the shortest night of the year, just after dark at 11:00 p.m., I walked to each of Seattle City Light’s test areas to see what’s sparking revulsion from Travers and others who live under the lights. The beams from the high-intensity, light-emitting diodes are striking. The rays turned my skin the color of white taffy and cast crisp shadows on the pavement. “Zombie blue” is exactly right: Like a day-for-night special effect in a vampire movie, the test streetlights create the sort of atmosphere where you almost expect the undead to emerge from the flower beds and begin eating your face. Everyone I spoke to enthusiastically supported the idea of the LEDs—which require 50 to 60 percent less electricity for the same lumens—but most resented the quality of the light itself.

The problem with the new lights isn’t just aesthetic. According to Dr. David Avery—a professor of behavioral sciences and light therapy at the University of Washington and the region’s leading researcher on the impact of light on human chemistry—the LED lights could interfere with human biorhythms. Certain photoreceptors in the eye’s retina react to cooler colors of the light spectrum, sending a signal to the brain that the sun is up. When humans see the blue light, our bodies think it’s daytime. “The sensitivity to these cells for the blue and greenish color makes perfect sense, because the sky is blue. So for millions of years, life has evolved with this 24-hour rhythm of blue light being very prominent for part of the day and then darkness,” he says. “This is kind of a conductor of a circadian symphony in the brain and body.”

According to Avery, “Theoretically, if someone has one of these LEDs or a blue light outside their window, it could fool the eyes and the brain into thinking that the sun is still up, so the melatonin hormone might not rise normally and sleep might be disrupted.” Incandescent lights, the standard bulb in homes, are on the red end of the spectrum. (You may think of them as being white, but they’re not.) Shifting the city’s primary outdoor lighting to blue-hued LEDS, Avery adds, “would be a major change in terms of our environment.” Studies suggest that people exposed to daylight at the wrong hours, like those who work night shift, have more health problems such as high blood pressure and obesity, Avery says.

Mayor Greg Nickels wants most Seattle residents to be living under new streetlights by 2015. Seattle City Light intends to install the lights specifically in residential areas—not commercial arterials or industrial zones, which require more illumination than LEDs can affordably provide.

“They would save about nine million kilowatt hours and about $408,000 a year,” says Seattle City Light spokesman Scott Thomsen. An LED lamp uses only 50 watts, while traditional high-pressure sodium bulbs require 130 watts and waste electricity on heat. The conserved power roughly equates to the energy used by 750 single-family houses a year, Thomsen says. Moreover, the LED lamps last three to four times longer—up to 18 years—which drastically reduces maintenance costs to the city. (The city currently pays about $100 in labor costs to replace each dead bulb.)

But LED fixtures cost much more. Whereas the bulbs in the existing fixtures (awesomely dubbed “cobra heads”) cost about $15, the LED lamps are part and parcel with their fixtures and each costs $300 to replace, says Edward Smalley, Seattle City Light’s streetlight engineering manager. “The real payout for the city, to the customer, is not having to go out to change the light.” Funding to kick-start the program comes from a $6.1 million federal stimulus grant to reduce energy use. Of that, $1 million will go toward installing the first 2,500 streetlamps next year, assuming the Department of Energy approves the expenditure this summer. If the city council expands the program, new streetlamps citywide will cost about $20 million.

City officials acknowledge the test lights aren’t great. (A different brand of LED is being tested at each site, or in some cases the same brand at different levels of brightness.) Although some people like the lights, other people in the test areas have been complaining—in one area, the reaction from residents has been so intense that Seattle City Light is canceling that test site. And it is continuing to look for better technologies. There’s a relationship between a light’s warmth and how much energy it saves. High-pressure sodium lights, which give off that night orange glow, emit light at about 2200 degrees Kelvin. But the pilot LEDs are between 5000 and 6000 Kelvin. While Smalley acknowledges the new lights are “a lot bluer, for sure, than what we have now,” LEDs as warm as the old lights aren’t energy efficient enough to be practical. Seattle City Light will begin testing slightly warmer-hued streetlamps in Seattle’s South Park neighborhood in late July. “We are looking at 4000 degrees Kelvin and above, so that way we can provide the best comfort for the city and the energy savings that we are looking for.”

Anchorage has begun installing 16,000 LEDs streetlamps, San Francisco has announced it will convert 30,000 streetlamps, and Los Angeles has announced plans to convert 140,000 lamps. Smalley says that technology to produce energy-efficient LEDs with a more palatable hue is evolving, with new generations of lights emerging as quickly as every six months.

Considering the bulbs live longer than most pets, the city should take as much time as necessary to pick a light we can live with for a while. Smalley said that those folks who dislike the lights, stay tuned and look to our next test sites like South Park. No one has locked into what you see out on the street now.

The First Purely White LED Produced in Korea

It is claimed from Korea Researchers that the world’s first purely white LED (light-emitting diode) has been produced in Korea.

Soo-Young Park, a professor of organic materials for photonics at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Seoul National University in Korea, led the group, which includes researchers from the University of Valencia in Spain.

LEDs are much more energy-efficient than incandescent or compact fluorescent lightng (CFL), but the quality of light they can give a room is up for debate.

Because LEDs do not naturally produce white light, getting them to look like they do adds to their production cost, making them much more expensive than your average incandescent or CFL. Many companies have been trying to come up with different LED recipes and components to produce a nice white light, while keeping the consumer cost down.

Park and his group claim to have engineered a molecule with one orange and one blue light-emitting material that produces a white light in the visible light spectrum when put together.

In other words, they say they’ve invented a white-light-emitting diode.

Repeated laboratory tests apparently showed that the new form of LED molecule is efficient, color stable, and able to be reproduced again and again, making it a legitimate candidate for use in LED lighting.

A detailed explanation of the group’s molecular work can be found in the current issue of Journal of the American Chemical Society.

According to Mr.Park and his group in their paper, an ideal material for a white-light source should be cost-effective, stable, robust, emit over the whole visible spectrum, not suffer from self-absorption, and its pure color should be easily reproducible. With this goal in mind, we have successfully synthesized and characterized, for the first time, a white-light-emitting single molecule dyad, consisting of two noninteracting chromophores showing excited-state intramolecular proton transfer.

Long-life LED Light Bulbs Released by Toshiba

It is announced from Toshiba Lighting & Technology Corp. that its long-life LED (light-emitting diode) light bulbs will hit the shelves on July 15, 2009.

A 6.9-watt and a 4.1-watt light bulb will be available for 5,460 yen and 5,250 yen, respectively. Their lighting levels will be equal to 60-watt and 40-watt regular bulbs.

The lifespan of the LED light bulbs is expected to be about 40,000 hours per unit, about 40 times longer than regular bulbs.

Although the long-life LED may seem expensive, an official from Toshiba said the LED light bulbs will greatly reduce the carbon dioxide emissions and electricity costs.

A New LED Light Bulb with 7 Shades of White

“Any color you like, as long as it’s white!” No, it’s not a bizarro version of Henry Ford, just Sharp’s new LED light bulb. Using the included remote control one can dial through 7 different shades of white light – without any white heat.

Ambiance at your fingertips has arrived, thanks to Japan’s Sharp Electronics Corporation. According to Sharp, the new DL-L60AV LED Lamp allows users to adjust the color function of the light bulb through a range of 7 different shades “ranging from a pleasing warm white to a cooler daylight white to match the weather, the season, time of day, purpose, or other preferences.” The adjustment is done via a hand-held remote control that also allows users to tune the brightness of the bulb to suit their preference. Forget Henry Ford, what would Thomas Edison think?

The thought of a single light bulb needing a remote control may seem somewhat extravagant but Sharp intends for the bulbs to act as stand-alone lamps; one per room is enough. The DL-L60AV LED Lamp is rated at 560 lumens – tops in the industry – yet cost a mere penny to run continuously for 11 hours. One especially “bright” feature of the DL-L60AV LED Lamp is its base; exactly the same as standard incandescent light bulbs so it can be used in existing lamps and light fixtures.

I’m not done yet: this bulb is cool – literally. LED’s don’t create heat like incandescent bulbs do, which means they don’t waste energy on creating such heat.

They also differ from incandescent light sources in that they emit very little light in the 350-nm waveband, the part of the light spectrum that lies in the ultraviolet range and attract insects. This makes the DL-L60AV LED Lamp ideal for outdoor use, especially near entry/exit doors.

The DL-L60AV LED Lamp is one of nine new high-efficiency, mercury-free LED light bulbs to be introduced to the Japanese home market this July 15. All have the convenient screw-type base that negates the need for expensive retrofitting. Very cool indeed!

LED There Be Light

While LED (light-emitting diode) costs are still high, this type of lighting is extremely long-lasting. And as prices come down, its efficiency could lead to huge energy savings.

The first consumer LED products lit up in the 1970s, with red light numbers on pocket calculators and push-button displays on big, geeky Pulsar watches. Then came those centered, high-mounted brake lights in the rear windows of cars. Now LEDs are found in everything from traffic lights to operating rooms to greenhouses.

An LED is a device that produces light when an electrical current flows through it. The color it emits depends on the materials used to make the diode.

“It won’t be long before LED lighting technology has a space on your desk, has a space on your ceiling, certainly has a space on your car,” says Russell Dupuis, an electro-optics professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dupuis was awarded the 2002 National Medal of Technology for his work on LEDs.

“Most cars today have a whole lot of LED, certainly the instrument cluster,” he says.

And some cities are also investing in LED for their roads. Dupuis says LED traffic signals would pay for themselves in about three months because of energy savings. And how long do they last? “Until somebody knocks the pole down!” he laughs.

Here are some numbers from the U.S. Department of Energy comparing lifetimes of LEDs to traditional lighting:

• Incandescent bulbs: 750-2,000 hours
These bulbs haven’t changed much in 120-plus years; they give off 80 percent heat and only 20 percent light.

• Compact fluorescent bulbs: 8,000-10,000 hours
CFLs are more efficient than incandescent. but do contain small amounts of mercury.

• High-power white LEDs: 35,000-50,000 hours
The Department of Energy estimates a quarter of the electricity in the United States is used for lighting, costing $50 billion per year. The agency says new technology could reduce lighting energy use by 50 percent.

For some big companies, the transition already makes sense. ”Walmart decided to replace the lighting in all of its refrigerated cases with LED lights,” Dupuis says. “Every store is going to save enough in six months to pay for this change.”

There’s also a niche for special lighting needs. Some surgical teams are using LED headlamps and operating-room lighting. LEDs also light up the words of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence at the Jefferson Memorial. And at the British Museum they illuminate the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band uniforms so the fabric doesn’t decay.

OLEDs, or organic light-emitting diodes, have other intriguing potential. They can be created on paper-thin plastics, and made into wallpaper, window blinds, even clothing.

But it will be several years before consumers can pick up a pack of LEDs at the hardware store. ”Designing lights with LED has inherent challenges,” says Michelle Murray, a spokeswoman for LED lighting manufacturer Cree Inc.

Those challenges prompted the Department of Energy to launch the L-Prize, a competition offering millions in cash prizes for the creation of a “high-quality, high-efficiency solid-state lighting products to replace the common light bulb.”

The Department of Energy admits major consumer confusion when it first started promoting the efficiency of compact fluorescent lights. It says the United States cannot afford to squander the enormous energy-saving potential of LEDs, so it wants to make sure the products are ready for prime time when they do hit the market.

The Department of Energy is setting 2012 as a target for large-volume production and replacement of incandescent lighting.

Battery-free LED Flashlight with Quick-recharge

As we all know that the LED flashlights are use batteries mostly. But a new high-tech flashlight called Light for Life become available to order.

What’s special about it? Well, the flashlight uses three LEDs, but its key component is Flashpoint Power technology, an ultracapacitor energy storage system from Ivus Energy Innovations.

Light for Life recharges in just 90 seconds and shines at 90 lumens for 90 minutes per charge. The flashlight has three modes: bright (270 peak lumens), standard (90 lumens), and strobe, which is good for dance parties or scaring the neighbors’ dog and kids (OK, I’m kidding, but you get the picture).

According to 5.11 Tactical, the 50,000-hour LEDs never have to be replaced and the flashlight is engineered to “offer 10 years of maintenance-free service under typical conditions.” (You can recharge it up 50,000 times or one time a day for 135 years.)

I got a chance to play around with the thing at a recent event, and I have to say I was pretty impressed. It’s lighter (16 ounces) than it looks, and it feels very durable. The one question I asked was: what happens when the power goes out and you have to recharge the thing? Answer: it comes with a 12V DC automotive charger, so you can use your car to charge it up in the event of a power outage.

The only drawback: Light for Life costs a whopping $169.99. But 5.11 Tactical says that when you add up the cost of all those D batteries over the lifetime of a battery-powered police flashlight, it’s still a deal. And then there’s all that good karma you get for not chucking those batteries into the garbage or landfill. It’s hard to put a price on that.

LED Array In The Green Spectral Range

AMS Technologies introduces Enfis Ltd.’s new LED array UNO TAG Long Green 532 nm.

The UNO TAG array completes Enfis line of LED arrays in the green spectral range besides the already available UNO green at 520nm. The new array features an aperture of 0.5 cm2, a 2000mW typical radiant flux, 1000 lumens typical luminous flux and 38W input power.

The LED array UNO long green is available as TAG array, as UNO TILE connectorised PCB array and as complete air cooled light engine with drive electronics.

The UNO long green array finds its usage in several applications including architectural lighting, entertainment lighting, backlighting, signs, illumination, effect lighting as well as forensics and medical and dental applications.

The UNO TAG is shown at LASER World of PHOTONICS (15th to 18th June 2009, Munich) at AMS Technologies stand B1.301.

The new product is available from AMS Technologies throughout Europe from local offices in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.

About AMS Technologies
Founded in 1982, AMS Technologies is a leading distributor of high-tech components, systems and instruments in Europe today. Headquartered in Martinsried/Munich, Germany, the company serves regional markets from local sales offices in the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain. AMS Technologies represents approved global technology leaders and new to market companies that develop innovative, leading edge products in the fields of optoelectronics, thermal management and high power electronics.

The Brightness of the Future of LED Lighting

With the growing awareness of the importance of environmental protection, LED (light emitting diode), due to smaller size, energy efficiency, longer lifespan and quicker activation than traditional lighting sources, is regarded as the answer to future lighting needs.

The lighting industry generally agrees that LED lighting holds immense potential to replace traditional counterparts in the next decade. With global warming threats looming in the background, LED lighting has a bright future for it can be installed literally flat on surfaces, does not shatter like incandescent bulbs, nor pose mercury contaminants as with fluorescents. So featuring low thermal resistance, high luminosity and reliability, LED lighting has been the focus of R&D in recent years, and looks to become a daily lighting source in the future.

Despite well-publicized efforts by many nations, lighting makers and advocates have not been able to sizably increase the market shares of LED lighting, evidenced by relatively few LED lamps available at retailers. Makers optimistically predict that 1W or higher super-bright LEDs are expected to grow at 14% annual compound growth rate in the following years, but so far less than 10% of typical lighting are LED powered. After years of development, LEDs are mainly used for nighttime advertising, auto lamps and traffic lights, with its focus being turned to larger-sized displays indoors and out, but not as mainstream lighting for indoors or outdoors. The costs and prices of LEDs are some 20-times higher than for conventional lighting, as well as the luminous efficiency of white LEDs being only 40-50lm /W are the reasons cited as the hindrances to their becoming more popular. And that LEDs are rarely used in traditional commercial lighting is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Many Challenges
Many obstacles stand in the way for white LEDs to widely replace fluorescent lamps, which are mostly used in office lighting, especially the high-efficiency, super-thin T5 fluorescent tubes. The T5s boast luminous efficiency of 100Lm/W, color rendering of Ra85, 91% light output after 10,000 hours of use, and diameter of only 16mm. Coupled with minimized pollution via using solid mercury alloy, T5s now pose less environmental hazards. Also white LEDs will not likely achieve similar luminous efficiency as T5s in the near future, as well as featuring relatively narrow projection angles, hence unable to illuminate spacious settings.

Instead of significantly boosting the use of LEDs, widely advocated policies to ban or replace incandescent bulbs have directly benefited energy-saving bulbs, such as compact fluorescent lamps (CFL). In Taiwan alone, the sales of energy-saving bulbs increased 20-30% annually during January to July 2008. With incandescent bulbs to be completely banned in most developed countries, the demand for energy-saving bulbs due to replacement worldwide will peak in two to three years. Such rising demand will not be met without raising the production of energy-saving bulbs accordingly.

Intermediate Product
An intermediate product, one between traditional halogen and LED lighting, for spotlighting has been developed: Major lighting makers have used ceramics to build the ceramic metal halide (CMH) lamp, which features good color rendering of Ra80-90, stable color temperature, is 4-times as durable as halogen lamps, with low-wattage CMHs burning only half the electricity. Coupled with electronic ballasts, CMHs are not only good lights but also energy efficient.

A study of a furniture chain store in Taiwan shows that replacing 2,700 units of 50W halogen lamps with 1,500 units of 20W CMH lamps saves 118KW per hour. Coupled with the added saving in air conditioning due to reduced heat output from less lighting, a single store saves NT$2.3 million (US$68,886 at US$1: NT$33.4) in power consumption, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 250 metric tons a year to help lessen global warming.

Outlooks
Currently typical LED applications are 80% concentrated in cellphone, automotive, consumer appliance and other displays. Such trend may not change despite the optimism of the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association in Washington, DC, which predicts the luminous efficiency of white LEDs to rise to 150lm/W by 2012, with rapid price reductions to widely popularize such lighting. Also Japan aims to entirely replace fluorescent lamps with white LED lamps nationwide by 2012. Although the R&D of LED lighting has clearly progressed since 2000, but a single LED still has only 5W of maximum efficiency, coupled with 35-40 Lm/W of luminous efficiency for white LEDs, so for such lighting source to be truly practical remains questionable.

LEDs are undoubtedly the best energy-saving lighting solution. But self-delusional mindsets of lighting makers and governments, as well as technical challenges, may blind consumers, preventing them to weigh the issue of marketability.

White LED lamps still leave much to be desired in terms of color temperature. Exceeding 6,000K, white LEDs cannot compete against even incandescent and fluorescent lamps, especially for applications calling for mood-creation as in restaurants, hotels and homes, where fluorescent lamps with color temperature lower than 3,000K are often needed.

Excessively pale color temperatures of white LED lamps also make such products less marketable for residential lighting in temperate zones, for consumers there generally prefer softer lighting to create comfortable, warm atmosphere in homes. In short, white LED`s low luminous efficiency and excessive brightness, which has to be toned down with lens or diffuser, make such lighting less desirable in color rendering and hence less marketable in some locations.

Ultimate Goal
Developing practical LED lighting may not be as difficult as building LED lamps that are rated good products after being used by consumers, which should be the ultimate goal for lighting makers. In other words, lighting makers have to firmly grasp the characteristics and needs of LED lighting applications to turn LEDs into practical, competitive lighting products. The reason that LEDs have yet to become ubiquitous indoor lights is that R&D people lack in-depth understanding of lighting applications, still trying to replace original forms of lighting, when they should be developing LED lighting as a new source by looking at its characteristics and human vision.

As such, more work awaits to be done to study and properly position the suitability and role of LED lighting, as well as integrate the resources of LED makers and lighting designers. The current focuses on LED lighting development seem properly aimed, tapping the inherent properties of such light source as brightness and fast activation, with LEDs mostly used in traffic signals, advertising displays, marquees, emergency lights etc.

The lighting industry now will undergo further systems integration. The top-three lighting makers have been taking over smaller peers in Asia and Eastern Europe to expand markets, as well as horizontally integrating electronic ballast makers to set up systematic lighting businesses, hence enhancing competitiveness.