作者：Blade

The main exit of the domestic LED lighting enterprises in the next three years(one)

Currently, the domestic LED lighting manufacturers are at a critical period. In one hand, with a global energy crisis, environmental degradation is increasing, governments as a further-generation light source technology has given great support, and coupled with the rapid development of LED technology and LED manufactures efforts, so far, that LED lighting to replace traditional CFFL, has become the consensus of the trend of energy-saving lamps. This means that, LED manufacturers are facing a very huge market. However, on the other hand, many of the domestic LED lighting industry testing standards are not established, the entire market is highly competitive and disorder. Even, the abroad LED giants, such as Cree, Philips, Os-ram, etc, are aimed at the Chinese LED lights market and actively market layout. There are indications that in the next 3-5 years, LED lighting truly replace the traditional lighting of the era is coming, then the market conditions of the LED into the tens of trousands of households will be basically sound, such as macroeconomic policy, industry testing standards, business models, the degree of maturity of the industry chain, performance indicators, and the scale of production, and so on. At that time, LED industry will experience a massive shakeout in the market restructuring exercise.

domestic LED lighting, The main exit of the domestic LED lighting enterprises in the next three years 3

Therefore, for the domestic LED lighting manufacturers, currently the most important issue that should be considered is that after 3-5 years, when the LED industry face the reshuffle, how to survive in the fierce competition of the domestic manufacturers and  foreign giants suppress crowding both internal and external pressure? If survive, what role to continue fighting in the market? Be a brand designer? Or OEM factory? Or something else?

For the popular market in the industry point of view, we do not dwell on them. Here is a little of my personal thoughts, Hope we all look on.

First, LED industry characteristics

Judging from the perspective of industry chain, LED industry can be divided into upstream LED epitaxial wafers and chips, the middle reaches of the package components downstream applications such as the three links. From the application of LED lighting, display, back light, three sub-markets. And the point of view from the field of product applications, LED application is divided into industrial areas, commercial areas and civilian fields.

 

How does LED lighting industry become bigger and stronger (three)

Third, how to achieve breakthrough LED lighting industry in China in the core high-end chip?

Breakthroughs in core bottlenecks, time and tide wait for no man.

In fact, the Government in the LED chip R & D has also given strong support, but it has no much effect. The reason: one is that we do not really aware of the high-end chip core and a key position in the LED industry, the overall funding efforts go far enough; second is that funding is too scattered, chip R & D is a capital-intensive projects, That too little input will be no substantive progress; Third, the entire LED lights industry, universities and research institutes, failed to unite, failed to achieve the centralization of R & D resources sharing mechanism.

How does LED lighting industry become bigger and stronger 3

Personally, I think the core high-end chip breakthrough LED lighting industry in China from now on, you must pay attention to the following aspects:

1. attaches great importance to concentrate funding.

There is no denying that the government has attached great importance to the LED industry. However, for the core-high-end chip R & D for the LED industry, they pay little attention in the true sense. While the government is trying to major projects, targeted to support chip R & D, but now, in the face of the facts of a larger technology gap with foreign chip makers, the distributed funding has been difficult to work.

Foreign chip makers in the initial phase, funded by the national government in the protection of the innovation system, and soon to the rapid development and has a certain influence. In China, due to the innovation system is not perfect, it could have been in the initial phase to less funding support to the rapid growth of the hatch mechanism can not function effectively,  resulting to the present, the state must pay more money to help the industry. This is a hard lesson for us.

Thus, we must be aware of the extreme importance of the upstream chip LED lighting industry, followed accordance with previous practice, we can not diversity funding as previous did, if doing so, it does not effect for the chip R & D.

How does LED lighting industry become bigger and stronger (two)

Second, why the high-end chip is the core of China’s LED lighting industry?

1, today’s high-tech industry development law.

LED industry is semiconductor-related high-tech industries. Throughout today’s high-tech industries, especially semiconductor-related high-tech industries, such as integrated circuits, communications, laser, and the upper reaches of the chip is often the key to the whole industry. This key role is not only reflected in the performance and price of the upstream chip determines the  performance of the middle and lower reaches of the product and the price is also reflected in the chip suppliers tend to control the patents and standards of the industry as a whole.

How does LED lighting industry become bigger and stronger 2

Although LED packing stage cooling problems and the optical design of the application stage have a certain impact on the performance of the final products,   Yet it must be admitted, LED lighting industry chip performance decide the entire products. For example, if the chip light efficiency can not reach 100lm / W, the stability and realiability of the chip itself is bad, even no matter how good the heat is, and how excellent optical design is, it is difficult to achieve the requirement.

More importantly, the chip-level competition is for the LED industry in China, competitive differentiation, and packaging and application-level competition more biased homogeneous competition. That is to say, compared with foreign manufacturers, China’s high-end LED lights chips is gaps, both qualitative difference exists, therefore, foreign chip makers, it is easy to obtain high profits differentiation strategy in China. Thermal and optical design problems despite relatively important, but have not yet appeared in the entire worldwide breakthrough solutions essentially. In other words, in the thermal and optical design aspects, the difference between China and foreign countries, there is no qualitative difference, various solutions are similar, the effect is similar to the corresponding patent influence binding than small, packaging and application vendors can only earn very low differentiation profit through each tiny improvement, which is the reason why the package and application vendors gathered in one of the main reasons.

In fact, one of the important feature of the high-tech semiconductor industry is through semiconductor micro processing technology, to let the entire products as much as possible concentrated in the upstream end of the chip, and left little to the middle and lower reaches of the technology space. Moreover, with the integration of the continuous improvement of this trend in the semiconductor industry, semiconductor-related high-tech industries will become increasingly concentrated in the upstream chip.

LED highway lighting: an over-fast development?

Currently, most of our highways are not equipped with street lights. With the introduction of LED highway lighting technology, experts expected a fast development of LED in this area. However, there are also some other people suspected that LED highway lighting industry was going too fast and worried about a deformed and unhealthy development at last.

 

Currently, most of our highways are not equipped with street lights. With the introduction of LED highway lighting technology, experts expected a fast development of LED in this area.

 

Mr. Junyan Xie, an expert from the street lighting field, indicated that: “LED highway lighting applications are far beyond where it expected and should be. I discussed with other experts and scientists in this part, we listed many advantages of LED highway products, but there still some disadvantages. In my opinion, before solving these problems, we should not promote such immature technology in the highway applications. This will increase the risk of accidents. ” Mr. Xiaoping Yang, a scientist from Beijing Institute of Electric Lighting Source suggested that it is infeasible for replacing all existing high pressure sodium lamps with LED lighting products. We should start with small roads and main roads. Highways will be the final step. After a certain period of development, when the quality and reliability of LED highway lamps can be ensured, it will be the time that LED lighting technology dominates the highway market. Mr. Yangsheng Chen, the chairman of China Association of Lighting implied that LED highway lamps may probably be pilot applied. It is not a right time to widely promote them due to the bottlenecks in technology and cost aspects.

 

Highways have their special driving requirements, especially in raining/snowing days. As we all known, high pressure sodium lamps have very high penetration, much better than White-ray LED lights. How can LED lighting applications competent in fog weather? Mr. Junyan Xie disagreed with the using of LED highway lighting applications. In his point of view, with current LED technology, LED lights will “totally be failed” in fog days. “That’s really dangerous for drivers.”

 

In the conditions of low-carbon applications having been supported in many countries and areas, safety is the most important factor in highway or other road facilities. Extreme weather conditions should not be omitted in the consideration of LED-related lighting applications. No matter how, it is the safety that most important than other factors.

Factors that constrained the development of LED highway applications

LED technology has a lot of advantages. But in practical, applications of LED lighting sources still have many restrictions, which have been the largest obstacles in the path of LED highway applications.

 

Factors that constrained the development of LED highway applications

 

1)       Heat dissipation.

Improving the heat problem of LED lights is always one of the biggest challenges for LED manufactures. The working condition and heat dissipation is the two major factors that can determine the real light efficiency of LED lamps and certainly the service life of them. Generally, when we discussed about the light efficiency of LED lamps, we were talking about the light efficiency with an junction temperature of 25℃. However, due to cooling designs and influences from surrounding temperatures, it is usually higher than 25℃ in practices. That means, in real applications, the measured light efficiency will be less than the theoretical value. A theoretically 100lm/W LED chip used in LED highway applications may only have a real light efficiency of 60-70lm/W.

LHP is an advanced cooling technology for LED lighting products which has been recently invented by a technological company from Taiwan. This technique was first invented to replay traditional heat sink, which has well solved the problem mentioned above and dramatically increase the service life of LED chips. In order to prove the superiorities of LHP, thousands of LED chips were selected to take a 3-year special aging test (light attenuation test). During these tests, selected LEDs should take constant work for 12 hours per day. After 3 years, the measured light attenuation was less than 3%. It is estimated that after 10 years, the average light attenuation of these chips will be only 20%.

 

2)       Cost-effective problem.

Presently, prices of LED chips were still in a high level, causing LED street lights cost much more than traditional street lamps. However, there are also some people believe that prices of LED lighting applications will drop into a much more reasonable level, for the reason that LED is a kind of semiconductor components and the continuous development of micro-electrical industry. At present, the highest light efficiency of LED chips is around 150lm/W. And it is estimated that after ten years, the light efficiency of LEDs can reach up to 350lm/W. Thus it can be seen that LED highway applications actually has huge potentials.

How does LED lighting industry become bigger and stronger (one)

Today, under the background of  energy shortage, environmental degradation, “energy saving” has become the main task of the Governments, and China is no exception.

How does LED lighting industry become bigger and stronger (one)

LED lighting technology by virtue of its high performance, long life and other advantages in energy saving, everyone touted the “superstar”. all levels of government spared no expense to support it, in order to “energy saving” policy; brightest investment and private capital investment directed as its “huge market” have pocket it; various research institutions have been “merry” reorientation aimed at it; Various civil society organizations also can not wait to be included in the scope of business. Especially after the global financial crisis, with the introduction of the scheme of the huge new energy plan of the new Obama administration in the United States and the Chinese government to expand domestic demand in most other high-tech industries hit by the crisis, the LED lighting industry seems “the scenery here is fine.”

However, the LED industry in China, the new darling of the beautiful LED lights, we should think calmly about the fundamental issues that the fundamental issues that overshadowed prosperity surface.

First, what is the core issue of China’a LED lighting industry?

From the application point of view, the main market of the LED is lighting, display and backlight. Display application market has matured, the back light market is maturing. Greater than the impact of these two aspects of the market by the financial crisis. However, whenever from the government “energy saving” sense or potential size of the market from the point of view or from the direction of technology development visit lighting applications are deserved is the top priority of the LED market. This is why Europe and the United States national attention to the root causes of the LED technology. So, talk about LED in this passage, it also focus on the lighting market.

The core problem for LED lighting industry is not that the middle and lower reaches of the package and application, but in the upper reaches of the high-end chip. Imagine, if China has been the lack of high-end LED chip, even invested ten times funds in the demonstration project. That is only for foreign chip makers in China to earn more profits.

OLED applications used in display and lighting industry

The rapid development of OLED technology contributed to its continuous improvement of surface area, light efficiency and service life. OLED applications area started to transfer from small-sized portable terminal applications to large-sized computer/TV screens. Recently, they show the sign of penetration in the general lighting field. In addition, they also have huge potentials in the fields of military, aerospace and other applications.

 

OLED applications used in display and lighitng industry

 

Display area:

With Samsung having launched high-end mobiles with OLED main screen (5.3-inch and 4.3-inch AMOLED screen), the 6-inches AMOLED continued to increase the occupation of the market. After the promoting of 6-12 inches AMOLED screen, OLED may probably be used as high-end displays for tablet PCs. It is reported that, in the forthcoming exhibition CES-2012, Toshiba are planning to exhibit tablet PCs with 7-inch OLED screens produced by Samsung. Many giant manufacturers of display announced the plan of promoting large-sized OLED TVs, showing the confidence of occupying TV market. LG claimed that they will promote the world’s biggest OLED TV panels (55 inches) in the coming CES-2012.

 

General lighting industry:

OLED lighting applications have higher CRI and belong to surface-emitting, not only can present natural and soft rays but also provide more creative space for designers in appearance. So far, OLED is still underperformed than LED lights technology in various areas: light efficiency, service life and prices, etc. Many giant companies treated this as an opportunity and actively expand the market. From the second half of 2011, NEC, Konica Minolta, Toshiba, Panasonic and other large manufacturers revealed OLED applications in recent lighting exhibitions. It is expected that in 2012 Frankfurt Fair, OLED lighting products have become a new bright spot. OSRAM, Philips, LG, Novaled, Ronda, Sumitomo Chemical exhibited their products. The Japan government also expressed their willingness in developing the OLED industry. on 30th of March in 2012, OLED applications has been installed in Jiyugaoka Station (one of the stations that on Tokyo line). All these lamps were produced by Panasonic, with a light efficiency of 30lm/W, an 80mm x 80mm panel will costs 30,000 yen. KANEKA announced that they will start to promote their OLED products to restaurants since April in 2011 and promote OLED lighting applications to residences and offices since 2015.

Comparisons between high pressure sodium lighting and LED highway lighting

LED and high pressure sodium are two major lighting technologies that used in road lighting applications, including highway lighting. They are two different lighting sources. Lighting effects (luminous flux, service life, CRI, color temperature, light intensity, light efficiency) are various due to totally different lighting principles.

 

Comparisons between high pressure sodium lighting and LED highway lighting

 

High pressure sodium lamps have higher light efficiency, longer working life, stronger penetrability and free of bugs. Normally, the power consumption of high pressure sodium lamps can reach up to several KW, which can satisfy most lighting requirements. After being developing for several decade years, the lighting sources and technologies have already been full-fledged. Thus the production costs of these products dropped into a certain low level. For example, the average price of high pressure sodium tunnel lamps with high IP levels is only hundreds yuan. Although high pressure sodium lamps have been widely used in road lighting and tunnel lighting field, they still have some disadvantages that hard to be improved: 1) lower color temperature, normally send out yellow rays. And also lower CRI, only 20% of the natural light. 2) Although that high-powered high pressure sodium lights satisfied almost all demands from customers in illumination aspect, they still consumed too much energy. Traditional high pressure sodium lighting systems often loaded heavy burdens on operators’ shoulders. High pressure sodium lights have relatively short service life. According to its technology, the best lamps can only maintain a normal work for about 25,000 hours. In some rural areas, with very unstable power grids and severe weather conditions, the life of lighting sources of high pressure sodium lamps will be even shorter.

 

As the fourth generation of lighting sources, LED highway lighting applications have following advantages: 1) soft rays, high CRI (much closed to the sunlight compared with light generated by high pressure sodium lamps). 2) Fast respond in the switch on/off, almost no delay and these processes will cause ignorable damages to the lamps. 3) LEDs have longer service life; also some disadvantages: 1) Since LEDs are semiconductor lighting sources, they over-heated working conditions will reduce their theoretical working lives. Thus, cooling problem was always one of the biggest troubles for LED highway lighting application manufactures. 3) Poor penetration, when used in tunnels (in the high way), a good penetration of lamps will reduce the risk of accidents.

 

Both high pressure sodium lamps and LED highway lighting products have their advantages and disadvantages. Although LED lights are more sophisticated than high pressure sodium lamps in many ways, there still a lot of problems need to be solved.

Misunderstandings of highway LED lighting

How to look at the highway LED lighting? It is such a clear topic since there are so many practical applications that can be referred to both in theory and application area. As the matter of fact, highway LED lighting is humble in the application area, the “overheated” phenomenon in LED lighting industry exerted negative effects both on customers and manufacturers. However, failure cases are always followed with successful stories. The expensive material costs made the initial investments nearly unbearable. Under the government supports through energy conservation policies, highway LED applications entered a new era. Do these lamps have more use value than traditional high-way lamps and be more suitable for high-way conditions?

 

How to look at the highway LED lighting? It is such a clear topic since there are so many practical applications that can be referred to both in theory and application area.

 

As the new lighting technology, LED has many advantages: long service life, high light efficiency, low power consumption, good dimming performance, good CRI, anti-vibration, single-direction lighting sources, environmental friendly. In one word, LED technology has been seen with huge potentials in the lighting market. Many domestic LED application manufacturers have shifted their attention into highway LED lighting area as a result of the rapid development of high-powered LED lighting technology. However, the domestic lighting industry seems to move into a vicious circle “LED=green lighting”. They placed too much value on LED but ignore the importance of traditional lighting applications. Mr. Tao Zhang from Lighting Management of Lianyungang, Jiangsu Province indicated that not only LED that can be marked as green lighting technology. In fact, many exiting lighting technology can be classified as green lighting, such like high pressure sodium lamps, which is more mature in technology. In Lianyungang, it is possible for street lights (250W high pressure sodium lamps) that made by OSRAM and GE can normally maintain a 5-year work without any problems. If taking the price factor into consideration, then there may not be much of an advantage to using LED street lights.

 

Some people may ask: how about the applications on highway? What are the advantages of LED lights and high pressure sodium lamps relatively in this area? “Currently, LED technology is still in the continuous development. Many technological bottlenecks have not been solved that. Nowadays the integrity and normalization of highway LED lighting has no effective solutions. Pilot applications are feasible, but had better not been used in large-scale applications.” said Mr. Tao Zhang.

The improved structures of OLED devices

Normally, OLED devices will have relatively complex constructions to obtain higher energy efficiencies. However, these complex constructions intangibly increase the costs of production. The simplified structure can dramatically simplify the production process of OLED devices and thus have significant influences on the promoting of OLED. The simplified structure was firstly invented by J. Meyer and his colleagues in 2007. They created a simplified green phosphorescent device that has two organic layers, the efficiency of which can reach up to 40lm/W under 100cd/m2. In 2011, professor Z. H. Lu and his team found that ITO surface that after chlorine treatments can increase the power function to 6.1eV. In this way, extra HIL and HTL can be omitted, and consequently simplify the design and producing of OLED.

 

Normally, OLED devices will have relatively complex constructions to obtain higher energy efficiencies.

 

Tandem structure: Stephen R. Forresh suggested in a recent published report that using MoO3 in white phosphorescent devices as the connecting layer. The total efficiency is 22.7lm/W. M. V. Madahava Rao suggested to use pentacene/C60 PHJ as the connecting layer of tandem. Connecting layers used this material have better luminousness, weakening the effect of microcavity.

 

SPP enhanced OLED structure: 20%-40% light generated by OLED devices will be restricted in SPP. If the metal surface has similar construction as nanostructure, the restricted light can be sent out from SPP. A. Krumar created a layer of gold clusters of the surface of OLEDs through vacuum evaporation. Applying this technique in phosphorescent devices can increase the light efficiency by 2.8 times. A. Fujiki used special chemical method to form a thin layer of gold nano-particles on the surface of ITO, then deposited CuPc on the HTL. The thickness between metal and the light-emitting layer is adjustable. In theory, the light intensity can be increased by 20 times.

 

Quantum dots used on the OLED applications: Chang-Ching Tu and his colleagues used electrochemical etching methods to create silicon quantum dots, and proved that the silicon quantum dots (which should generate Blue-rays) usually sent out red rays due to Stokes shift caused by surface oxidation. In the “Solid State Project” of US Department of Energy, QD Vision created the enhanced quantum dots substrate for OLED solid state lighting and led lights, which can increase the light efficiency from 60% to 76%.