作者：Blade

LED enterprises focus on Olympic

PV photoelectric and sports event, a rather wired combination. These two seemingly irrelevant areas now have been tied up with each other. As the world’s first PV companies sponsor for the World Cup, Yingli Group is in preparation for the World Cup 2014: provide the most expensive photovoltaic power generation system for Maracana Football Stadium in Brazil. It seemed that a quiet consensus has been set up in the photovoltaic field. With the approaching of London Olympic Games, a series of event marketing for the Olympic Games is also heating up.

PV photoelectric and sports event, a rather wired combination. These two seemingly irrelevant areas now have been tied up with each other.

As early as in March this year, Guangdong NVC lighting has signed a partnership agreement with Chinese Olympic Committee of Hong Kong, Chinese Olympic Committee of Macao and Chinese Olympic Committee of Taipei in Chongqing Sheration Hotel, followed by another lighting enterprise CNlighting, who intended to become the official sponsor and strategic partner of the Chinese fencing team and consequently gain the ticket for London Olympics.

 

This is not a first handshake between LED enterprises and the Olympic Games. Lighting projects of Beijing Olympic Games have been competed among several giant LED enterprises. Finally, Philips, NVC, Mitsuo Aurora and Morninghope Lighting won the battle, and shared the 500-million-yuan Olympic lighting project cake. Spending more than 10 million on CBA made Timesos became the most eye-catching LED Lights manufacturer recently. In an earlier negotiation with State Physical Cultural Administration (SPCA), Timesos signed a four-year contract and became the official sponsor for CBA in next four years.

On one hand, with the vigorous launching of fitness programs, the enthusiasm of people for sporting events is growing sharply. This also provided a premise for enterprises in the sports marketing. On other hand, the success of Coca-Cola, Samsung, Anta, Special Steps and Pick also gave a shot in the arm to other domestic LED enterprises. After tasted the sweetness of sports marketing, quite a few photoelectric lighting companies began to test the water.

 

In the industry view, although sporting events can help establish a brand and get through the market, it is actually a rapier. Once failed in operation, LED Street Lights companies would suffered serious harms. Compare with shoes and clothing industry, LED lighting business is in the early stage, with relatively limited funds. Engaging in sporting events is really a big challenge for them.

From the failure of vision photoelectron resolution led display lighting industry

The industry demand slowdown, and the shopping price make led display lighting industry reshuffle. Flowing last year, especially after the collapse of June Tatsutaro of Jun Tatsutaro Boren, recently Shenzhen has a medium-sized led lights display production enterprises–vision optical Electronics Company Limited(hereinafter referred to as the “vision optical electronic”) collapse.

From the failure of vision photoelectron resolution led display lighting industry

Another fallen

According to media reports, may the kind of light electronics in June 29th officially declared bankrupt. The assets of 100 million yuan, a total of more than 400 employees of led display lighting production enterprises of light electronic wave arrears amounted to 20000 yuan, in addition to poor plant decoration party more than 38 works.

The company’s financial manager said, the bankruptcy of the company is to a large extent because of the SME loan difficult problem.They had to get a loan of the Bank of Hangzhou, now they are more afraid of the Bank of Hangzhou to creditors.

A reporter from the Shenzhen credit online to vision, optical electronic legal representative as the Xing Yi, the company address in Shenzhen City, Baoan District Longhua streets Clear Lake Road Guohong industrial zone.

Many industry insiders told us that the Xing Yi, Sichuan, had worked in the domestic led display lighting one of the leading enterprises of Shenzhen City, Chau Ming Technology Co., Ltd. In 2005, Xing Yi founded the vision of optoelectronic, the main production of various indoor and outdoor LED street lights display, a substantial part of exports of US and European markets, has also set up vice-factory in Hangzhou.

One worker who works with Xing Yi, hopes that the vision of optoelectronics in recent years have structural changes occurred, and the sharesholders of a scramble for profits. So funds are tight.

“Failure of vision photo-electron, in essence, because of more competitors. Regardless of quality, at the low end of competition, there is no profit.” LED flood lights Engineering Industry Research Institute Xiao-Fei Zhang pointed out to the newspaper, and then generate the funding strand breaks, arrears-domino effect, the upper reaches of stock and stop production.

One supplier told me the vision of the photoelectron is a family business, and comprehensive management capacity is weak, the end of last year no longer a supplier to the vision of photoelectron.

It is understood that the vision of the photo-electron may be arrears as high as thousands of yuan.

OLED technology will become the next breakthrough for LED lighting industry?

Since 2011, export orders from abroad dropped sharply together with a non-fully developed domestic market. Under such circumstance, many downstream LED street light companies intend to find some breakthrough in OLED technology.

 

OLED is an abbreviation of Organic Light-Emitting Diode, also called Organic Electro-luminesence Display, OELD. It has properties of lightweight and energy saving. This technology was firstly applied on displays. In 2003, OLED technology started to use on MP3 and received positive responds. Compare with LED, OLED was a so called new born baby, having strong vitality and cannot-be-underestimated potential. Facing intense competitive, LED producers started to move their attention in this field.

 OLED technology will become the next breakthrough for LED lighting industry?

In accordance with a recent report issued by SME Research Center of Peking University, the total output value of domestic LED industry is around 150 billion yuan in June, 2012. The estimated annual compound growth rate is 25% in next 3 years. The downstream LED applications, like LED displays, LED backing applications, indoor LED lights, will occupy more than 75% market. Indoor LED lights will become the biggest LED lighting market in near future. The estimated annual output value will be 25 billion yuan in 2012 and 100 billion yuan in 2015.

 

Since lacking of the core technique, most LED chips need to be brought from foreign companies. In most indoor lighting products, the chip cost take over about 60% of total cost. Thus, costs of domestic LED products will maintain in a higher level in short period of time. Downstream market is the fiercest in all LED market. The number of new built LED companies sharply growth recently, more and more manufacturer joint into this battle. Many of them were forced to drop prices, and the profit space was shrinking. Professor Peng Jin, secretary-general of Shenzhen semiconductor industry association indicated that those capable downstream enterprises should not only concentrate on overseas market. Presently, they need pay more attention on upstream, establishing their own LED chip Research and Development Department to create their own LED chip technique. Otherwise, “we are working for our competitors.”

 

The development of OLED technology also provided a new profit growth point for domestic LED manufacturers. Mr. Xiaofei Gao, President of LED Industry Research Institute felt confident about OLED’s future development. “Compare with LED, OLED can stimulate more creative to meet more individual needs”.

 

How to make high quality LED chips (3)

In some cases, packaging process impact more influence on LED lights chips than themselves. Before designing lamps, engineers should request LED standards or specifications from their suppliers, and conduct light intensity test to ensure that package did not distort the original parameters too much. Good LED chip suppliers can guarantee that the reliability of their LED package will maintain at least three years. Some of them even provide customized high quality LED chips according to the specific requirements.

In some cases, packaging process impact more influence on LED chips than themselves.

Testing before production is rather important. There are an example in transportation area can help explaining how tests can prevent LEDs failure in high-degree visibility applications. In 1990s, LED products were used as stoplights on cars and trucks. The performance differences due to the inconsistence of LED chips caused serious damages for these lights and even traffic accidents. Not until recently, when LED lighting technique started to use as traffic lights, this issue received enough attention. Pressure test and accelerated life cycle test are two new modules that typically designed to solve this problem. Those high quality LED chips which has passed these two tests can really safe to used in more harsh conditions.

 

Not every application required high quality LED chips with advanced and precise packaging. If packaging cannot meet the stringent demands, serious accidents are still avoidable. If the cost of maintenance is reasonable and a few defects are also acceptable, producers will intend to use worse LED packaging.

 

The most essential point is whether these high quality LED chips can be affordable. If producers never consider of the cost, they can obtain a perfect LED chip with highest quality and best packaging but also a ridiculously high cost. Therefore, within the constraint of cost, packaging level, assembling design and testing should be taken into account. There must be some trade-off. If price were not a consideration, LED lighting manufacturers need to spend a lot time on choosing the best LED chips and co-operate with those LED street light suppliers whose can provide a complete set of reliability and accelerated life cycle tests. In most cases, this kind of co-operation will be long termed. The large potential profit let many medium and small businesses scramble for.

Which part of the LED lighting industry making money(2)

Such as a LED lights business in October last year into the field of LED lighting, participating in the Guangzhou International Lighting Fair in June this year, after the show received some foreign customer inquiry and send samples, due to the lack of factory preparation, hurriedly prepared samples, aging test is not in place, the results of product to the customer when the normal lights have been customer complaints. So I think you want to gain a firm foothold in foreign markets, the quality is the first, and it is out of question to talk the business without good quality.

Which part of the LED lighting industry making money(2)

A lot of investment LED lighting industry, the proposal for these new entrepreneurs?

Mainly depends on the hands of the funds. Less funds can only be cut from less input LED street light applications, but the positioning of the product is very important. But the positioning of the product is very important. Once the selected direction to a certain extent determines the success and failure of the enterprises. If funding is sufficient, you can enter the middle of the package. Package surface is not difficult to procurement chip package. This step is good or bad impact on the chip of the angle of the light and light ratio. So it is a great technical content step.

The investment package must be aware before the package, so it will be even more smoothly. The newly established LED lamp factory will always be the development of new products and chaos. The sample produced is more rough. And the production process is a bit confusing. In fact , the root of the problem is the lack of engineers with some experience. Production line workers are the low level of understanding of LED lighting industry.

The key to solve these problems is to make full preparations before the plant is built. planning the development direction of a good product, so that confusion does not appear in the mass production process. Another point is to recruit engineers with some experience is very important. After all, a good engineer can save enterprises a lot of detours cost and time, and also can promote the technology level of the other engineers.

 

How to make high quality LED chips (2)

Except individual LED chips, LED Lights packaging and LED power supply can impact significant influence on their capacities, brightness and color. We defined them as internal factors. External factors are mainly from circuits and other electronic components. Since working temperatures, current, circuit construction, voltage peak can also affect the performance of LED chips. Proper circuit design and assembly is the key to protect the LEDs and ensure their performance. During the packaging process, even different assemblers with different working experience will cause the non-uniformity.

 Except individual LED chips, LED packaging and LED power supply can impact significant influence on their capacities, brightness and color.

With the rapid development of LED demand, the global-oriented LED chip suppliers and packaging factories are booming simultaneously. Unfortunately, the over-booming trend made many manufacturers choose to use low quality LED chips to reduce cost. Besides, their LED packaging designers and engineers are usually lacking of working experience. Most OEM producers have no capability to establish their own LED chips sections. Replying on other LED chip suppliers is their single solution. Experienced producers know how to choose right suppliers and also conduct a series of testing for LED packaging and circuit structure.

 

In order to eliminate the injustice during the testing, many companies chose to employ a third party to test the quality of LED street light chips. In the period of testing, randomly chosen LED chips will be gathered together into some specific testing rooms. These LED chips will be continuously working for several weeks in the harsh conditions, including pressure test, temperature test, fixed/flexible voltage test, fixed/flexible current test, etc. A large amount of data should be recorded before and after the testing. The three major parameters of LED: light intensity, color, potential drop should keep in record during the entire testing process. Only high quality LED chips can survive from it.

 

Accelerated life cycle testing is a key point to avoid failure in special applications. This test can help eliminating those LED chips which has an estimated service life more than 100000 hours but will be failed after 1000 hours work. This happens often. The light intensity of low quality LED chips (or high quality LED chips with unreasonable assembling) will drop dramatically after 1000 hours work. In fact, low quality LED tubes chips using higher driving current are more brightness than high quality LED chips in the early stage of service. However, continuously working in high temperature may cause huge damages to them.


How to make high quality LED chips (1)

Most LED lighting designers believe that all LED chips have same quality. However, there are hundreds of thousands of LED chip providers or LED chip manufacturers. Asian LED Lights manufacturers can produce the cheapest LED chips all around the world. But, to buyers’ astonishment, only very few of them can actually make high quality LED chips. Low level LED chips can only be competent in small lamp market. But in other application area, in which LED products should be used under severe environment (expressway, military/aviation, other industry), high quality LED chips are necessary.

 Most LED lighting designers believe that all LED chips have same quality. However, there are hundreds of thousands of LED chip providers or LED chip manufacturers.

For new comers in LED industry, how to judge the quality of LED products became one of the must-to-be-learned subjects. In fact, choosing high quality LED chips is the first step. Currently, the internationally recognized best LED chip manufacturer is CREE. Chips made by CREE have a common property of high lighting efficiency. Compare with other LED chips with the same power consumption, like Epistar, SAMSUMG, CREE chips will have more than 5%-10% luminous flux. And also, CREE chips have less light attenuation, which means, the actual service life of their chips is longer than the estimated 50000 hours.

 

If taking chip materials and manufacturing process into account, the most advanced wafer fabrication process must be the essential point. A 2-inch wafer can be cut into more than 6000 LED chips. Using one wafer, a good manufacturer can limited the differences of chips within a very slight region in almost every aspect (chip color, brightness, voltage drop). The differences can only be generated during the packaging process. Low quality LED chips will have huge differences in properties during the chip-cutting process, not to mention the packaging process. Thus LED chips generated by small factories are kind of mixtures without any classifications.

 

Best LED chip manufacturers not only produce high quality LED chips, but also perform classified packaging according to basic LED chip parameters: color, brightness, potential drop, and optic angle. A good LED street light chip suppliers will provide their customers with unified products (with much similar basic parameters).

 

In application area which high quality chips were required, like boundary lights on the airport runway, must reach FAA level certificate. In order to avoid significant accidents, mix-packaged products with much worse uniformity cannot be used.


Which part of the LED lighting industry are making money

From the current market trend, the price war has begun. In particular, after the production of LED lighting and famous Zhongshan large-scale penetration of LED lighting, the competition becomes more intense. Low price record has been renewed. We can only rely on the number of spell profits. As far as I know, the higher corporate profits only have few products lines. But more products within a single series, the quality of the high-end line, mainly for foreign markets.

How is the profit for LED Lights foreign trade?

Current of the lamp price of foreign markets decline, for example, 18W LED fluorescent tube in early is 240-280yuan/piece, and now has dropped to  210-230yuan/piece. European market is relatively better, but Africa and Asia is relatively low. Such difference has created various led lighting industry business development ideas are different, others insist that the route of the high price of higher quality, some choose a low price route.

Which kind of light is more expensive?

Now the most expensive products are the demanded products such as led lighting industry fluorescent lamp, LED bulb lamp, LED spotlight. Because the using amount of these lamps are huge, an office space raging from several thousand to as many as tens of thousands of 10 hours a day. According to the lights count, all-day power consumption is still very alarming.  Like LED lamps for light lamps, LED interior lighting home light market has not to the extent of large-scale outbreak. First, this lamp usage as LED fluorescent tube, the second is the high price of the products. Another is the LED glare problem. The above problems have constrained its growth rate, and large-scale replacement still need time.

If you want to make lighting foreign trade, where the technology should pay attention to?

A lot of led lighting industry wanted to foreign markets, foreign markets, particularly stringent requirements on energy saving and environmental protection, while the LED is the best alternative for energy saving and environmental protection. Many companies for short-term profits. Do everything possible to save material costs, this resulted in the samples and mass production of great hair.

Analysis for low power LED lighting industry

LED lighting technique can be divided into three levels according to the power consumption: low power LED lamps (smaller than or equal to 20W); mid power LED lamps (20W – 50W); high power LED lamps (larger than 50W).  In this article, we will discuss about low power LED lamps.

 In 2010, the selling of global low power LED lamps was around 8.9 billion dollars.

In 2010, the selling of global low power LED lamps was around 8.9 billion dollars. Experts estimated that from 2010 to 2015, the CAGR of low power LED lamps will be 39%. Low power LED lighting industry has a large potential.

 

MR11/16 lamps are low power lamps. Before the emergence of LED Lights, this area was dominated by halogens. A typical design is: 12DC / 24DC after transformers. The equivalent LED lighting technique still need transformers to convert AC to DC. Since they are more vulnerable to the variations of input voltage, transformers used on halogens are not competent. Currently the most commonly used transformer for MR16 LED lamps is high frequency electronic transformer. At present, the small LED market was mainly occupied by these two types of lamps. Both of them have advantages and disadvantages: LEDs have higher light efficiency while halogens are cheaper. 4W LED equivalent to 20W halogen.

 

The biggest challenge for LED MR11/16 lights is lacking of an identical standard, including cover, project, power factor and other electronic parameters. Different low power LED lighting manufacturers may probably have their own standards as a result of immature development. There will be no quick solution for this problem. Manufacturers should recognize the importance of a sustainable industrial development. And government also need to continuously issue support policies.

 

A new solution can embed transformers within LED drivers. As mentioned before, transformers for LED lighting products are much complex than halogens. Typically used solution is non-isolated PFC, which has been removed directly from transformers into drivers. Not only had the entire production process been improved (dramatically reduce cost), but also had the installation been simplified. The new non-isolated PFC drivers are more suitable for small sized PCB used in MR covers. PFC replaced all capacitors with transistors, saving a lot of space. It can meet the requirement of PF and THD only though certain outside components. They have a power factor as much as 80%.

 

Intelligent LED lighting systems in the underground parking lot

Intelligent LED lighting systems using in underground parking lots is a complex combination of advanced digital technique, electronic sensors, wireless technology, signal sampling, central control, LED displays and LED Lights products. It is a brand new intelligent lighting system which can provide sufficient brightness according to the position of carports. The central system will “judge” by itself at what time to switch on lamps. Electronic sensors were installed at some points in advance, covering the enter region. When sensing cars, sensors will trigger adjacent lamps to provide light for them. At the rest of time, these lamps remain in the condition of dormancy. This kind of design can dramatically reduce the energy consumption. Meanwhile, light intensity sensors installed at every carport can automatically adjust lamps for this carport by “judging the nearby brightness”. Within the entire intelligent lighting system, LED technique is just a small but very important part. In order to fully realize the green concept, designers decided to use the most environmental friendly lighting technique at the moment: LED.

 Intelligent LED lighting systems using in underground parking lots is a complex combination of advanced digital technique, electronic sensors, wireless technology, signal sampling, central control, LED displays and LED lighting products.

Intelligent LED lighting systems was composed of four main sections: central control system, data sampling sensor group, guiding system and LED lamps.

 

Central control system used the most advanced ARM9 2440 series, 400MHz frequency, having more than 130 multi-function I/O ports, 24 external interrupt resources and several popular peripheral interfaces.

 

Occupancy sensors, voice-activated sensors, microwave sensors, ultrasonic sensors and ambient illumination sensors constitute the entire data sampling sensor group. These sensors are normally installed on the top of each carport. Among them, ultrasonic sensors play an important role in sensing cars movement.

 

Guiding system is actually a series of instruction set which has been embedded into CPU in advance. After collecting enough information from data sampling sensor group, guiding system will search the nearest vacancy from built-in database and transmit the corresponding information to drivers though broadcast or other indicative marks. Guiding system is a daring design of intelligent LED lighting systems. It has nothing to do with green concept but, to a large extent, realize the complete replacement of labor with computers.

 

LED lamps are controlled by lamp triggers mounted inside of walls. This part is the terminal of the entire intelligent lighting system and also a user interface.

 

Intelligent LED lighting systems were well received after launch. Experts indicated that more and more intelligent LED lighting products applications should be and will be developed and finally into our daily lives.