Taiwan Holds Its First LED Lighting Show

Taiwan held its first light emitting diode (LED) lighting show in June this year. The show attracted some 60 world leading LED-lamp suppliers from Singapore, Hong Kong, the U.S., Japan and Taiwan. Manufacturers including Nichia and Lumileds displayed their latest products at more than 100 booths on the show floor.

Despite some unresolved technological problems, LED lamps are considered an up-and-coming mainstream lighting source because of their power conservation, durability and environmental friendliness. The LED show highlights Taiwan's determination to put power-conservation technology at the top of its agenda for next-technology development plans. Part of the stimulus for power conservation is due to efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.

To remind people of the glowing future prospects for LED lighting, the show's organizers invited lighting designer James Yuan, principal designer of J.Y. Lighting Design Studio, to design an "Avenue of LED Stars" section at the show to demonstrate LED lighting's advantage in beautifying indoor spaces, architecture outlines, open spaces and city avenues at night.

Peter Shih, executive director of the Cabinet-level National Science Council's Electro-Optics Science & Technology Committee, stresses that LED lighting is a combination of art and technology. He adds that the day of widespread use of LED lighting is imminent, and that Taiwan should prepare itself for this situation. "The preparations must include reduction of production costs so that the lamps can become a prevalent product as soon as possible, " Shih said. He forecasts costs of LED lamps to decrease over a five-year period. To realize the goal quickly, his organization is working with some of the island's elite universities on a technology that makes growing InGaNi LED material on silicon substrate possible. The substrate is much less expensive than sapphire-based substrates that have been used in the past. He says the team has made impressive technological progress in the laboratory.

Shih analyzes that Taiwan has many advantages for developing LED lighting, the most important of which is the island's excellent manufacturing technique. For instance, the island now puts out one billion blue LED dies a month, making it the world's No. 1 supplier of the diodes.

Lumileds of the U.S., which now owns the world's most advanced high-power LED technologies, showed off its latest products at the Taipei show through Canadian dealer Future Electronics. These products have been applied to automotive lamps, traffic lights, architectural lighting, edge lighting, billboards, signage and portable lighting.

According to Maynard McKeagan, product manager of Future Lighting Solutions, Lumileds' automotive LED lamp customers include General Motor, Toyota and Lexus. Many carmakers in Taiwan and South Korean also use Lumileds' LED lamps.

McKeagan introduced Lumileds' Luxeon K2-family high-power LED lamps to visitors at the show. The lamps turn out 60 lumens per watt at 350 milliamperes, with a color temperature of 6, 500 degree Kelvin white light (zero degree Kelvin is equal to -273.16 degree Centigrade). The lamps maintain at least 70% illumination after 50, 000 hours of burning at 1, 000 milliamperes. Most of all, the lamps are compliant with RoHS and WEEE directives for nonleaded packaging materials.

Lumileds is a joint venture between Philips Lighting and Agilent Technologies, with Philips offering its lighting technology and Agilent's offering the LED-chip technology. McKeagan points out that Lumileds has opened a production facility in Malaysia as a part of its plan to pare down production costs and efficiently deliver the products to customers in nearby markets. In response to buyers' frequent complaints about the high prices of the company's products, McKeagan says that Lumileds offers various value-added services including total solutions and orders in any volume, large or small.

McKeagan is bright about Lumileds' future, saying that room for the company to grow remains ample since the LED lighting market has just begun taking off. He notes that Lumileds has seen its revenue double each of the past few years, although he can't offer precise numbers.

Nichia Corp. exposed its LED lighting products for the first time at the Taipei show. Although it controls the majority of patents on white LED lamps that employ YAG fluorescent powder and its LED business unit's revenue has reached 180 billion yen (US$1.6 billion at US$1:110 yen), the company hasn't yet entered the lighting business. "We are here preparing for our entry into the market, " commented Yashuhiro Hagiwara, an assistant manager for the business planning department of Nicha's Optoelectronics Products Business Unit.

Hagiwara points out that his company will create products for all the applications for LED lighting in the future. He boasts that his company produces not only LED lamps, but also the critical YAG powder, which gives Nichia an almost insurmountable edge over its rivals. "Our strategy is selling the lamps directly to lighting-equipment suppliers, and we are confident that they will come to us because of our outstanding quality, " he said. However, he confesses that there is still a long way to go before LED lamps become a popular lighting source, considering that lighting manufacturers are still learning how to use the LED's focused lighting source-as opposed to the currently available area and linear lighting sources-in applications in daily life. When asked how soon the lamps will become a prevalent lighting source, Hagiwara just shrugged his shoulders.

Like Lumileds' products, Nichia's LED lamps have been criticized for their expensive pricing. Hagiwara replies by saying that his company's LED prices have dropped to half the level of five years ago, when it began offering the products. "At that time, our products were pricy because of our costly investments in production equipment. The prices have dropped considerably as a result of five years of equipment depreciation, " he explains.

At the show, Nichia demonstrated products that generate 42 lumens per watt at one watt and above. Hagiwara predicts that one- and two-watt lamps will become mainstream LED lighting products, and that only lamps producing at least 100 lumens per watt will be used as day-to-day lighting sources. His company, he reports, has created lamps that produce 70 lumens per watt in laboratory, and is working on increasing that number.

Although lighting insiders have reported that Nichia would soon license its technology, as OSRAM already did, to pare down production costs, Hagiwara says "Our concern about the licensing is whether the licensing will help make the market pie bigger or not. If is positive, the licensing is meaningful. If the consequence of the licensing is to create more competitors, then licensing is not necessarily."

Taiwan's No. 1 lighting manufacturer, China Electrical Mfg. Corp. (CEMC), demonstrated an assortment of LED lighting products at the show. Among them were a patented red/blue/green LED module, which employs the company's proprietary packaging technology. "The technology enables our LED lamps to be only one millimeter thick, the thinnest of their kind. In addition, our packaging technology also offers excellent heat dissipation, " says Vivian Kao, a project assistant manager for CEMC's marketing division. Their compact size allows CEMC's LED modules to easily go into various lighting equipment, including desk lamps, architectural lighting systems, entertainment lighting and automotive lamps.

T-BAR ceiling lighting equipment was another shining product at the company's booth. The system, which measures 660mm long, 600mm wide and 35mm thick, is equipped with 72 high-power white LED lamps. The lamps each generate 50 lumens per watt by consuming 80 watts an hour. The equipment was also exposed at the Taipei show for the first time.



CEMC also demonstrated outdoor-use solar-powered LED lamps and their dimmers. The company co-developed the dimmer with an Australian company and debuted the product last year. Kao points out that her company is the first Taiwanese lighting manufacturer to possess LED dimmer technology, and has already installed the device in LED lighting systems at the Taipei Railway Station and the five-star Lalu Hotel on Sun Moon Lake. "The dimmer is used to control the LED lighting system to give off colorful lights and create a fun mood, " she explains. The controller can also work with traditional lighting.

CEMC's most impressive LED-lighting application to date came in 2002, when it installed 300 sets of lighting fixtures containing 8, 000 white LED lamps at a 10-story building owned by the cabinet-level National Science Council (NSC) for about NT$1.3 million (US$40, 600). The NSC building reportedly uses the world's largest number of white LED lamps.

Alan Huang, a specialist at CEMC's International Department, notes that LED lighting represents around 3% to 5% of the company's total revenue, and that Asia is the major market for its LED lighting products. He says that LED lighting is still in a developmental stage, considering the expensive pricing of the lamps and the need to improve their efficiency.

CEMC also used its presence at the show to promote own-brand "TOA" for overseas markets, revealing its determination to expand sales in overseas markets. "We have promoted our traditional-type lighting products in some countries in Europe, Latin America and Africa, and we need more effort in this area, " he said.

At the show, Lite-On Technology Corp., Taiwan's largest LED packaging house, showed off high-power LED lighting equipment for special applications like backlight modules for rear projectors and thin-film transistor liquid-crystal displays (TFT-LCD) panels. These modules use LED lamps with power specifications ranging from one, three, and five to 10 watts. According to Jason Gau, a manager of Lite-On's Peripheral & Components Business Group, the company's LED business has reported revenues of around NT$7 billion (US$218 million) in each of the past few years, constituting 6% of the company's total revenue.

The company displayed modules for pocket projectors for the first time at the Taipei LED show. The modules are installed with red/green/blue LED lamps, which produce 20 lumens per watt.

Gau points out LED lamps will still require a development time of one to two more years to become a lighting source for spaces with large areas. At current efficiency levels, the lamps can be used only for small spaces, he noted. "Hitting 85 lumens per watt will be a critical benchmark for deciding whether LED lamps can be a major lighting source or not, and that minimum threshold should be achieved in 2007, " Gau estimated. He expects the efficiency level to be pushed up to 50 lumens per watt next year from current 40 lumens per watt.

As LED power rises, so does heat, making heat dissipation a serious problem inside LED lamps. However, Gau says that heat dissipation is one of his company's specializations. "We manufacture power-supply, digital-camera backlight-module and packaging units. Power supplies in particular require quality heat-dissipation technology. The other two units represent our specializations in optoelectronics and mechanical components. All of the three specialties are required in LED-lighting manufacturing, " he said.

Color Stars Inc. specializes in LED lighting systems for landscape architecture and indoor decorations. Although the company opened only three years ago, it has already been contracted to install the systems in Taiwan, mainland China and the U.K. In Taiwan, its accomplishments can be seen on the Guandu Bridge, the Tainan Municipal Cultural Center and Chun Yuan Christian University. In the mainland, its lighting system is beautifying a department store in Tianjin at night. In the U.K., the SPA room at Oaks Golf Club, Oracle Shopping Center and Alter Ego Bar are decorated by the company's LED lighting systems.

"These accomplishments can be attributed to the members of our technology team, who are good at electronics, telecommunications and lighting. Most of them used to work at Acer Corp., Philips Lighting and Westinghouse, " said company CEO & president, Jimmy Chen, who worked at Westinghouse for more than 10 years.

Chen stresses that the LED lighting field has a high entry threshold because it combines electronics controlling technology with lighting. The company's electronics and telecommunications specialists, he adds, are the right talents for electronics-controlling systems.

Chen points out that his company originally planned to simply sell LED modules and controllers to lighting manufacturers. However, Color Stars soon discovered that the plan wouldn't work when its products were turned down by most of the lighting manufacturers it approached. "Lighting manufacturers usually do not understand electronics science. Thus, we started making our own lighting fixtures last year, using our own modules and controllers, and we also started looking for engineering contracts on our own, " he recalled.

Most of Color Stars' LED lamps come from Lumileds. They are products that produce 30 to 40 lumens per watt at one watt of power. To make their product prices competitive, the company produces modules in mainland China. "Price remains the decisive factor in the LED lighting market. We plan to pare down prices by one third this year and another third next year, " Chen said.

Chen notes that in addition to their advantages in durability, power conservation and low maintenance costs, LED lamps also do not emit UV rays. "However, at this time the lamps can not generate full-spectrum light and their efficiency is still low. Lighting manufacturers are concerned about these factors, " he notes. Chen is confident of reaching the goal set by the LED industry of elevating the efficiency to 100 lumens per watt by 2007.

At a forum on the sidelines of the show, Michael Chiu, chairman and general manager of Primo Lite Co., Ltd., pointed out that the large-scale application of LED lamps to lighting has just begun, and that the application range is expanding. "The product's market potential is quite huge, since LED applications now account for only 2% of the world's lighting market. The total market now has a value of around US$100 billion a year, " he stresses. Primo is a competitor of Color Stars.

In recent years, mainland China's energy-conservation policy has brought Primo sizable business opportunities. "The policy is a blessing to our company because we have won many contracts in the mainland, " Chiu says. Most of his company's contracts in the mainland have been lighting engineering for architecture and for ancient monuments. He says LED lamps not only conserve power but also beautify these buildings.

To quickly snatch up more business opportunities, the company has opened six sales outlets and an assembly factory in mainland China. The mainland's contracts, Chiu says, contribute 40% of his company's revenues. He believes that the mainland market poses huge business opportunities and challenge. "The rapidly growing mainland economy implies business opportunities, and the challenge mostly comes from the price-cutting competition, " he says.

Founded in 2001, Primo has won a high reputation in the market, due mostly to its management team, which is composed of specialists who formerly worked at Philips Lighting, and to its adoptions of Lumileds' LEDs.

J.Y. Lighting Design Studio's Yuan points out that LED lamps have brought lighting designers great joy because the lamps' fixed wavelength characteristic makes them an ideal lighting source for fixed-length lighting design, while their varied colors make them very suitable for many lighting designs. "You can create added value for LED lamps only when the lamps are applied to lighting designs. Otherwise, the lamps are only plain products that will eventually run into the price cutting competitions that are usually ignited by mainland Chinese suppliers, " he stresses.

Juang Fjh-shyang, a professor at National Formosa University and chairman of the school's Graduate Institute of Electro-Optical and Materials Science, suggests that organic LEDs could be an ideal substitute for LED as lighting source. "In spite of a shorter life span as compared with LEDs, OLEDs are much less costly and have an area-shaped light source. OLEDs' most prominent weak point is their inferior heat resistance. So, power input should be confined to a certain level, and the way to boost their lumens is to improve organic illuminant substances like phosphorous, " he notes. The specialist and his institute have been involved in the development of OLED materials for many years. He says the average life span of OLED lamps is about 10, 000 hours, around only one tenth the life of LED lamps.

Besides the OLED's low cost, its other advantages include its flexibility, allowing it to be affixed to ceiling and walls, and its lack of reliance on gas, eliminating the worries about gas leakage. Juang predicts that OLED lamps will experience a sharp increase in use, and will replace some incandescent lamps and fluorescent lamps between 2008 and 2020.