PC Memory Company Rambus Focus on LED Market

Rambus is best known for its PC memory technology. Recently it has developed a process for making flat LED plates to replace overhead office lighting.

The company on Wednesday at the Lightfair Intenrational conference will show off prototypes of a system that it says can lower the manufacturing costs of LED lighting for commercial buildings and flat-panel displays.

Last year, Rambus bought patents from Global Lighting Technologies related to components of a flat LED fixture. Having developed product prototypes and a manufacturing process, Rambus is now seeking to license that technology to other companies, executives said on Monday.

The components to a flat-plate LED designed for overhead lights. The textured gray layer is a lens to reflect light uniformly on a flat surface,
(Credit: Rambus)

The technology itself is not the actual LEDs, but components for an edge-lit lighting panel. LEDs are placed on the edge of a panel, which is about a half-inch thick. A “light guide,” made up of textured plastic, acts as series of tiny lenses to reflect the light so that it emits uniformly from the flat plate.

The prototypes that Rambus plans to show are two rectangle shaped light sources–one 2 feet by 2 feet and the other by 3 inches by 43 inches.

If the company is successful, larger versions of those flat-plate light sources would replace florescent bulbs used in office buildings. In a commercial product, manufacturers would license the process technology and use LEDs from another supplier, Rambus executives explained.

“My guess is that we’re about two years away from parity with fluorescents because LEDs are on a faster cost curve,” said Tim Messegee, vice president of marketing at Rambus.

Now companies or consumers buy LEDs based on the cost savings over time and for other benefits, such as the lack of mercury and the longer life of LEDs, he said.

Philips Unveils a 12-watt LED Light Bulb

It is reported that Royal Philips Electronics unveiled a 12-watt LED light bulb that it will begin selling as a substitute for standard 60-watt bulbs by the end of the year.

The bulb will be dimmable and will provide 806 lumens, with the potential to save up to 80% in energy consumption, compared to incandescent bulbs.

Philips said the bulb has a 25,000-hour lifetime.

With federal legislation phasing out inefficient lighting in the years to come, it’s likely that additional LED replacement bulbs will hit the shelves in 2011. Last week GE (NYSE: GE) unveiled its first–a replacement for 40-watt bulbs.

Philips also detailed broader marketing plans for its LED offerings in years to come. The company is introducing a home lighting system called LivingAmbiance, which wirelessly integrates luminaires and lamps to create different light settings–including a range of thousands of different color–with touch-button control.

In 2010, the company will introdue a product platform of outdoor luminaires that it hopes municipalities will adopt for streetlighting.

The company is currently exhibiting its new products and concepts at the Light + Building architecture fair Frankfurt Germany.

Blowout Prices on LED TVs

As LED becomes more and more mainstream, the question ought to be asked: is an LED TV worth the extra cash? To some, absolutely not. Only price matters. To others, price takes a back seat to the overall viewing experience, and from initial reviews by buyers and critics, the viewing experience is worth every dime.

So what is it about LED TVs that are better?

One of the strong criticisms of LCD TVs has always been the color and contrast. While LCD TVs control a competitive edge over plasma TVs in a lot of areas, the overall black levels of the traditional LCD TV cannot compete. To enhance the experience, manufactures began developing LED LCD TVs that offer a pair of lighting techniques that sharpen up color and contrast levels.

The first, standard edge-lit LED TVs, offer a slightly better lighting technique than a traditional LCD TV in that more powerful, more efficient lights located on the edge of the TV shine inward and diffuse evenly on the screen.

The second, full-matrix LEDs, utilize a technology better known as local dimming that disperse LED light from the back of the TV, instead of the sides, giving it a very even distribution of light. Essentially, the full-matrix technology is able to achieve unmatched color levels and contrast.

The beauty of the LED technology is not just the improved picture quality; LED TVs are more efficient and slimmer than just about any TV on the market. In fact, Samsung’s LED TVs use as much as 40% less power than any equivalent-sized traditionally-lit LCD TV.

Essentially, the best TVs on the market are LED TVs. So, where are the best places to buy the highest-rated LED TVs at the lowest prices?

Highly regarded as one of the best TVs in the last year, the Samsung UN55B8000 55-Inch 1080p 240 Hz LED HDTV has dropped significantly in price as Samsung has already launched many of the enhanced, upgraded C5000, C6000, C7000, and C8000 series models (the C7000 and C8000 are the new 3D LED TVs). Priced as low as $1,823.99, this local dimming model is almost $2,000 less than the suggested retail price, and has moved up to the #1 bestselling LED TV on Amazon.

If 3D LED is the direction you want to go, the Samsung UN55C7000 55-Inch 1080p 240 Hz 3D LED HDTV (Black) has dropped from $3,299.99 to $2,669.00 (more than $600 off a 2010 TV). As mentioned in other Tainted Green reviews, the Samsung 3D LED TVs includes a 2D to 3D converter that instantly changes regular TV into 3D TV. Few large retailers can even get close to this price.

Finally, if value is what you want and you don’t mind a non-Samsung LED TV, Sharp offers the Sharp AQUOS LC40LE700UN 40-Inch 1080p 120 Hz LED HDTV for under $900. The price is right and so far, the reviews have been very positive.

The time is now, when models are changing and prices are dropping, to buy an energy efficient, slimmed down LED TV.

CRS Elec Lights Turned to New LED Lamp

It was reported from TORONTO that when Manhattan’s tony One Beacon Court on the Upper East Side looked for ways to reduce its energy bill, as part of a much-broader global effort to green the planet, it turned to a small Canadian company for its lighting needs.

CRS Electronics Ltd. (LED.V) based in Welland, Ont., CRS developed, designed and manufactures solid-state lamps that use light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as their light source. It’s a disruptive technology that’s on the cusp of transforming the estimated US$100 billion global lighting industry. If well designed, LEDs can provide light that is the same as or better than conventional light sources, with significant energy and cost savings. According to Strategies Unlimited, a Mountain View, Calif. research firm, the commercial and industrial market for LED replacement lamps is forecast to roughly double each year through 2013.

CRS, whose roots are in school-bus lights, makes a low-watt MR16 LED replacement lamp that replaces halogen technology. MR16s are widely used for accent, task and display lighting in stores, hotels, restaurants, condominiums, commercial buildings, museums and art galleries.

“We didn’t just want to do LED because it’s green, and it saves energy and costs. It also had to have an aesthetic value, and match up with the coloring of the bulb that was already in the hallways. And that’s what we achieved. The bulb itself was just a better product than I could get anywhere else,” he says.

He’s ordered 500 lamps, and expects a 12-to-14 month return on investment, since each lamp can burn for 50,000 hours.

The commercial market for MR16s is estimated to be about US$2.2 billion, according to industry statistics. It’s such a big market that hundreds of upstarts, primarily from China, are popping up, primarily because the lighting giants, such as GE, are looking further afield. “It’s buyer beware. There’s a lot of misleading information out there,” says Mia Paget, who manages the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solid-state Lighting product testing program, CALiPER.

The CRS MR16 is technologically and aesthetically superior, a claim that’s backed up by the results of both independent laboratory and DOE testing.

In May, CRS went public, listing on the TSX Venture Exchange.

CRS, which installed the LED street lamps in downtown Welland, is eyeing the US$61 billion street and area lighting market, where there was 0% LED penetration in 2008, according to an October 2008 Navigant Consulting report.

The Main Challenge of LED Industry

In last article, we talk about that there’s a consensus that most of those barriers. They should be removed in the next 2-3 years. Impressive energy efficiency progress are announced on a regular basis by LED manufacturers and reliability is improving as engineers become aware of the challenges posed by the design of a flawlessly integrated LED luminaire (GE recently identified more than 100 possible failure mode in LED light engines).

Multiple standardization organization are working on defining and implementing testing and performance standards and communicating them to the public. Solid state lighting is progressing niche by niche.  More municipalities are testing LED streetlight and some have already committed to massive retrofits (200,000 street lights in Los Angeles). Adoption in commercial and retails lighting, while still low in volume is progressing fast (announcements from Wall Mart, Starbucks…). While we all have our eyes focused on residential applications, it’s important to realize that homes are the smallest segments (in term of lumens) compared to industrial, commercial and municipal lighting. However, for most, it remains the ultimate frontier.

But even this application now seems within reach and LED replacement bulbs might come to your home faster that you expected. Don’t rush yet though, as low quality products are still flooding the market and might create a negative initial perception of the technology, a risk that the industry is aware off and trying to control by working on performance standard (make sure you get products meeting or exceeding the Energy star criteria for solid state lighting). In Japan, the largest electronic manufacturers are making a strong push with quality products. Toshiba Lighting and Technology introduced a 60W equivalent replacement LED bulb for JPY9,000 in late 2008. The same product now goes for less than JPY4,000. Sharp launched similar offers and the price is now expected to reach  JPY2,000 in 2010. At this pace, most now expect the cost of LED replacement bulbs to reach the $10 for 1000 lumen target commonly accepted as the “magic” number that will trigger massive adoption by 2012.

In the US, Philips released the first LED bulb to participate to LPrize contest organized by the US Department Of Energy to reward the first 60W replacement LED bulb to meet aggressive performance targets.  A lot of credible light bulb replacements could be seen at the recent Strategies In Light conference exhibition floor and CREE is planning to release a retail version of its award winning LR6. The price point at which it will be released will send a strong signal to the industry.

Accelerated Growth of LED Industry

The LED industry has entered a period of accelerated growth driven by faster and broader adoption of the technology for large LCD TV.

After riding the cell phone keypads and LCD screen backlight wave during the previous decade, the industry is on for a spectacular growth thanks to large LCD backlight applications. While similar in essence to the smaller LCD screens, the larger displays found in laptops and large flat panel TVs were until recently more difficult to illuminate with LEDs because of their large surface. One must give credit to Sony and Lumileds, now a subsidiary of Philips, for pioneering the field in 2005. However, while delivering outstanding performances, the price of those LED backlit TVs were out of reach (>$10,000) for most consumers. A strong push by Apple, Dell and other brands allowed LEDs to start being adopted in laptops in 2007. In 2010, the adoption of LED for the segment should exceed 80%. But until 6-8 months ago, the industry consensus was that broad adoption of LEDs for large displays (20” and above) was still at least a couple years away. Samsung shook the industry in the second half of 2009 by bringing into the market a flurry of breakthrough products at affordable prices. Thanks to various engineering breakthrough and a strong marketing push (LED TVs anyone??), the unexpected success of the product put large LCD TV 2 years ahead of the initial roadmap and rescued the LED industry from what was going to be its first year ever of negative growth in 2009 (2001 was a flat year).

Since then, All TV manufacturers have jumped into the bandwagons, and LG, Sony, Sharp, Vizio, Toshiba all lined up an impressive series of new LED backlit LCD TV for 2010 with aggressive pricing. The cost of LED backlit TV remains marginally higher than “old fashion” cold cathode fluorescence lamp (CCFL) TV. However the price gap is shrinking and the consumers are falling for those ultra-slim TV with high contrast ratio and in some cases, improved color gamut and reduced motion blur. However, because of the engineering tradeoffs necessary to keep cost under controls however, not all the potential benefits of LED backlit TVs are offered on every set.  But, as technology improves, LED cost decrease and economy of scale become significant, the adoption rate of LEDs in LCD TV is expected to jump from 2-3% in 2009 to more than 20% in 2010 with the most optimistic forecasting 39 millions LED TV sets for the year. The adoption rate should further increase to 70% by 2013 and volumes exceed 150 millions. The exact impact on the LED industry is difficult to quantify though: because of the mix of panel size and the variety of design options (edge lit vs. backlit, white LEDs vs. RGB), estimating the exact number of LED chip per TV set is challenging (it varies from 250 to more than 1,000 on certain models). The one sure thing however, is that LCD TV will carry the LED industry through what analysts call it second growth cycle, possibly slightly restrained by tensions on the Sapphire substrate market and the ability of equipment manufacturers to deliver the record amount of MOCVD reactors to be shipped in 2010 and of the chip manufacturer to install and qualify them on time (it takes3 months to start production on a new reactors and in some cases another 4-6 months is needed get the chips from the new reactor validated by the final customer).

So what about the next big thing for LED: General Illumination? The main barriers to a broad and immediate adoption are still here. Those are essentially:
- Energy efficiency.
- Reliability.
- Color consistency and stability.
- Lack of standardization.
- Confusing supply chain.
- Upfront cost.

LED Makers Promise to Shake up Global Market

LEDs, once confined to the tiny red indicator lights on TV remote controls, have now grown to illuminate TV screens themselves and promise to shake up the global lighting market.

LED (light emitting diode) backlit TVs were heavily featured at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this month, as manufacturers announced products intended to emulate the success seen by Samsung in 2009.

Samsung, which has 80 per cent of the US market for LED TVs, aims to quadruple global sales in 2010 to more than 10m.

But manufacturers such as LG, another Korean player, say Samsung will not have things all its own way as LED-backlit TVs become available at entry-level as well as premium prices. LG will offer cheaper edge-lit LED technology, which requires fewer arrays of diodes, on its entry-level TVs and full LED backlights on premium models.

LEDs have graduated from use in mobile phone screens to backlights for notebooks, PCs and now TVs and monitors.

They offer better brightness and contrast, energy savings and slimmer screens than those using the established cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs) now used for backlighting.

LED technology was first introduced in 1962, beginning with a low-intensity red light. Semiconductor-based diodes or valves produce light from the excitation of electrons as they are moved over a “light” bridge by a direct electrical current. LEDs differ from traditional incandescent light bulbs, which produce their light from heat generation.

Over the years, white LEDs have been developed by combining chips that produce different colours into a single package, or by adding a yellow phosphor layer. Improvements in light intensity and cost reductions are now resulting in wider adoption of LEDs.

Pete Moran of the DCM venture capital firm says LEDs have advantages such as longer life and greater efficiency compared with both incandescents and the energy-saving compact fluorescents with which consumers are currently replacing them.

As well as the green argument, there are manpower savings from LED’s longevity. Cities such as San Francisco, San Jose, New York and Minneapolis are testing LED street lamps that will not need regular bulb replacement by lighting crews. In retail, Walmart and Starbucks are replacing lighting in their US stores with LED bulbs to cut energy consumption.

But as big semiconductor makers such as Samsung and Micron begin to take an interest in the LED industry, it could eventually take on the same characteristics as the DRAM, or flash memory, industries, according to analyst Daniel Amir.

The LED industry will then become cyclical, with a period of oversupply as early as the second half of 2011, according to Lazard, although demand should still be growing at rates of 20 to 30 per cent a year.

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Nanosys Do Efforts to Improve LEDs

As we all know that in this struggling economy, businesses as well as the general populace are all struggling to do more with less. In the case of LED and nanotechnology, however, that may not be necessarily a bad thing.

Take for example the work showcased at CES by Nanosys, a company that has developed a method to add nanomaterials to blue LEDs that improves the appearance of LED lighting. Their efforts have created an LED light that combines the energy efficiency of a blue LED; with a nanotechnology layer that alters its blue appearance into a warm white light that is better than standard LED lighting.

The benefits of the added nanotech material not only means improving the quality of the emitted light for backlit LED displays
, but doing so while still maintaining a low power profile. Plus Nanosys claims, the process can be added to a company’s assembly line for electronic products without the need for major retooling.

So expect to see better looking LED lighting in the near future as Nanosys nanotechnology starts to appear in televisions and other lighting products beginning later this year.

Ultrathin Inorganic LEDs

There is now a new process under development to create ultrathin, ultrasmall inorganic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and assembling them into large arrays, which offers new classes of lighting and display systems with interesting properties.

Applications for the arrays, which you can print onto flat or flexible substrates ranging from glass to plastic and rubber, include general illumination, high-resolution home theater displays, wearable health monitors, and biomedical imaging devices.

“Our goal is to marry some of the advantages of inorganic LED technology with the scalability, ease of processing, and resolution of organic LEDs,” said John Rogers, the Flory-Founder chair professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois.

Compared to organic LEDs, inorganic LEDs are brighter, more robust, and longer-lived. Organic LEDs, however, are attractive because you can form them on flexible substrates, in dense, interconnected arrays. The researchers’ new technology combines features of both.

“By printing large arrays of ultrathin, ultrasmall inorganic LEDs and interconnecting them using thin-film processing, we can create general lighting and high-resolution display systems that otherwise could not be built with the conventional ways that inorganic LEDs are made, manipulated, and assembled,” Rogers said.

To overcome requirements on device size and thickness associated with conventional wafer dicing, packaging, and wire bonding methods, researchers developed epitaxial growth techniques for creating LEDs with sizes up to 100 times smaller than usual. They also developed printing processes for assembling these devices into arrays on stiff, flexible, and stretchable substrates.

As part of the growth process, a sacrificial layer of material embeds beneath the LEDs. When fabrication is complete, a wet chemical etchent removes this layer, leaving the LEDs undercut from the wafer but still tethered at anchor points.

To create an array, a rubber stamp contacts the wafer surface at selected points, lifts off the LEDs at those points, and transfers them to the desired substrate.

“The stamping process provides a much faster alternative to the standard robotic ‘pick and place’ process that manipulates inorganic LEDs one at a time,” Rogers said. “The new approach can lift large numbers of small, thin LEDs from the wafer in one step, and then print them onto a substrate in another step.”

By shifting position and repeating the stamping process, LEDs can transfer to other locations on the same substrate. In this fashion, you can create large light panels and displays from small LEDs made in dense arrays on a single, comparatively small wafer. And, because the LEDs can be placed far apart and still provide sufficient light output, the panels and displays can be nearly transparent. The thin device geometries allow the use of thin-film processing methods, rather than wire bonding, for interconnects.

In addition to solid-state lighting, instrument panels, and display systems, the new method also allows for flexible and even stretchable sheets of printed LEDs, with potential use in the health-care industry.

“Wrapping a stretchable sheet of tiny LEDs around the human body offers interesting opportunities in biomedicine and biotechnology,” Rogers said, “including applications in health monitoring, diagnostics, and imaging.”

LED Backlighting

It is said that energy-saving flat-panel television sets are about to become common in shops, spawning a whole new range of technical words to understand in Berlin.

Most manufacturers believe the best way to reduce TV power consumption is to change the type of lamp at the back of the flat panel, as well as to devise clever ways to reduce wasted light output.

The newest liquid-crystal-display (LCD) television sets are to feature LED backlights instead of the cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL) which have done the job in the past. LED stands for light- emitting diode.

That is where the confusion starts, because at the same time, the electronics industry has been trying, without much success, to develop TV-sized displays where the image itself is formed by a matrix of LEDs.

LED backlighting has got nothing to do with that technology: all it changes is the light source that shines through the LCD screen.

Word has been spreading for a decade that LED light bulbs are more efficient than fluorescent lamps, so it is no surprise that TV manufacturers are also turning to this new light source.

Philips, for example, claims an energy saving of 40 per cent on its televisions.

The different ways of configuring this new type of backlight are sure to set off more confusion.

The simplest way to deploy the LEDs is around the four edges of the screen and let the light diffuse across the back of the screen. This is cheaper, and salespeople will make a point of explaining that these ‘edge-lit’ displays are even thinner than their predecessors.

‘For the bigger screens, this requires about 500 LEDs,’ explains Peter Koch of LG Germany.

More expensive are the so-called direct LED backlights. Instead of being placed around the edges, these LED lamps are arrayed right across the back of the screen. Direct-LED backlighting is a smart idea because the intensity of the light can be dimmed behind dark parts of the image. This ‘local dimming’ creates deeper, more natural blacks.

‘If the image is of people under a night sky,’ all the LEDs behind the sky will be turned off so that it really seems dark,’ explains Sascha Lange of Toshiba Germany.

This matters, because LCD televisions are often thought to be a degree inferior when compared to plasma flat-panel televisions. The black on existing LCD screens is generally a dark grey, and colours generally seem washed out when viewed off-centre.

Over time, local dimming also helps to save electricity and keep the TV set cooler.

The new backlights generally use LEDs that give off white light, but there is a third variant, the so-called RGB backlight system, which uses a mixture of red green and blue LEDs.

This will only be offered in the most expensive sets, aimed at buyers who want the very best. In fact, television broadcasts do not demand such a subtle graduation of colours, but the difference will be visible while watching the highest-quality high-definition films from Blu-ray discs.