Lighting/Illumination Forum

What progress is solid-state lighting making in replacing incandescent and fluorescent lamps?

CONVENED AND MODERATED BY RICHARD COMERFORD

In October, Electronic Products convened its second Lighting and Illumination Forum. The purpose was to try and gain a broad perspective of where solid-state lighting stood at present, what some of the significant issues are, and where the industry was headed. We began by asking each participant to introduce her- or himself, give us some idea of their background, and tell us what areas they thought were of particular concern today with lighting and illumination.

Robert Sagebiel (Lighting Director, Arrow Electronics): Arrow Electronics put together a team of lighting application specialists to focus on the development of solid-state lighting solutions based on high-brightness LEDs. What we found in the market place is that customers would be dealing with LED companies or with semiconductor companies or optics companies and everyone approached the lighting challenge from very different angles based on their particular areas of expertise.

Customers who are new to solid-state lighting may be very familiar with conventional lighting sources, incandescent and fluorescent, tend to promote their solution as the total solution when in fact it’s only part of the solution. We found that a lot of customers are struggling to really do an integration of solid-state products that they could handle on their own.

So with that in mind, we felt that we could help bridge the gaps by bringing all the elements of a complete solution into one place at one time.

Paul Scheidt (Product Marketing Manager, Lighting Division, Cree): Cree has been talking about lighting class LEDs for just exactly a year now, since we launched the XR-E back in October, and a lot of what we’ve been saying has been coming true, in particular with regard to the outdoor lighting segment. We’ve seen the value in the long lifetime and efficacy of LEDs. So it’s been an interesting dynamic coming forward.

Right now, we see really two different customers. We have a traditional LED customer who’s used to buying LEDs to go into, say, a color-mixing application or a signal application or backlighting. But we’ve also got customers who have dealt with fixtures and bulbs and are now coming into the LED space. There is a difference in requirements between the two, but areas both of them are interested in right now would be efficacy, the cost, the color stability, and lifetime. Those are really the key issues I see.

Electronic Products: With regard to the adoption of LEDs for outdoor lighting, the City of Ann Arbor announced that it was going to change over its entire street lighting to LEDs as part of the LED City Program. That seems like a significant milestone, and I believe Cree is involved in supplying its X-Lamp technology for that project.

Brian Hedayati (Executive Director Management Business, Maxim): Since I joined Maxim three years ago, we’ve developed a new product line mainly for high-power high-brightness LED drivers. There were a limited number of LED drivers being manufactured, and the drivers that existed in the first generation tended to be mainly products originally targeted at some other kind of power conversion application and were modified to address LEDs.

For the new generation product, our focus is developing drivers that address a specific LED market or application. LED applications require better, optimized drivers, so we have introduced many new drivers targeting automotive applications, solid-state lighting, projection applications, and LCD display backlighting.

Crystal Lam (Product Marketing Manager, low-voltage power management, ON Semiconductor): I have a different application perspective than the people who spoke previously. While ON Semiconductor develops LED drivers for different types of application, including general lighting, automotive lighting and LCD backlighting. I focus LED drivers for low-voltage, battery-powered, portable consumer applications.

When developing LED drivers for the portable market, there are always concerns about the size of the solution. The driving electronic circuit has to be small and high efficient in order to reduce power dissipation within the very compact form factor of the portable device. Cost, of course, is another key concern.

Then there are concerns regarding heat dissipation. When using high-brightness LEDs in a mobile device, there is a very high current in the driving circuitry, and the heat that is generated needs to be very closely managed. Also, various type of protection features need to be included in the design.

Electronic Products: It seems to me that the lessons you’ve learned focusing on compact and portable applications for LEDs actually apply in many lighting situations, emergency lighting for example. And thermal seems to be a concern for all LED lighting devices, because of changes in dissipation requirements that solid-state devices, by their nature, typically demand.

Available for adoption

Jim Loeffler (Senior Marketing Manager for General Lighting, OSRAM Opto Semiconductors): I think the biggest change we’ve seen in the market in the last year or so is that two to five years ago a lot of the LED companies were telling people “LEDs are coming, get ready.” And in some ways everybody acknowledged that maybe they were coming and they didn’t quite understand whether the horizon was one year away, or five, or ten — the lighting community in general has a pretty long view of things, so I think they thought it was ten years out.

What I’ve seen in the last year is that the customer base luminary manufacturers or users or whatever — have kind of become believers. It’s no longer a small community of LED providers touting the messages of LED; the world, the consumers, are ready to some extent to adopt LEDs, maybe not in all applications, but in many applications today.

LEDs have moved from really an architectural-lighting-driven, general-lighting business for into outdoor area lighting, and into retail applications, and even residential and commercial applications in the last year. And obviously those trends will only continue and get stronger in the next few years.

Euan Morrison (Senior Consultant, Sagentia): As a a technology development consultancy, Sagentia is basically an expert at developing new technologies, products, services that challenge the basis of competition. Recently we’ve been doing a lot of work in the area of solid-state lighting with a number of major development projectsfor general lighting, medical technology, entertainment, and other application areasall based on the latest high-brightness LED technology.

We’ve heard a lot about all of the issues and things like thermal management. Those are things that we are working with here on a daily basis really; that’s what we are about.

Richard Saffa (Vice President, VLED Business Unit, OPTEK): At OPTEK we work in all wavelengths and components, but with a specialization in the subsystem — or value-added assemblies — side of this. Like everybody else in the Forum today, we’re seeing certainly a lot more market acceptance now than we did even 6 or 18 months ago. LEDs are touching about all of the conceivable markets, from architecture through automotive and machine vision.

As was mentioned, a lot of customers are very anxious to get into solid-state lighting but they do need a lot of help. So we work real hard to simplify design and validation at the system level and product level, not only from the assembly side but also from laboratory validation.

LED color performance

Electronic Products: Before we get into some of the prospects for LEDs, I’d like to start on a technical basis and talk about LED color performance.

It seems that people get used to certain types of lighting colorthe color of a fluorescent or the color of an incandescentand there’s a broad spectrum of color in there. Let me ask, Paul, what are the issues surrounding color today with regard to solid-state lighting?

Paul Scheidt: There are two main ones I see. The first is the issue of what you call the chromaticity bending or some people call it the “Times Zero” chromaticity bending: when you first turn on the lamp, what chromaticity appears.

And it’s an issue of exactly what you were talking about: people currently have expectations based on the light sources that they’re used to seeing. And it’s for the range of chromaticities associated with those light sources, because not every fluorescent bulb has exactly the same chromaticity, even though it’s labeled a 3,500K color temperature. Further, there really is, to use an LED term, a bend associated with that; there’s a distribution of chromaticities around it.

So here’s an issue: do LED suppliers really just match their bend to the historical yields? There’s an issue from the lighting community as to how to match these two realities together, between what people are used to and what the LED makers are bending.

Electronic Products: Can the bending be dealt with in the formulation of the device?

Paul Scheidt: Well there is still going to be variation in the process, in our current technology, and so that’s why there are so many bends and such a wide variation.

I don’t want to speak for other manufacturers, but Cree in particular has more of a neutral bend, which is what people are using mostly for indoor lighting. Our bends are modeled after the United States Energy Star bends, which were adapted from the ASCII standard that’s underneath it. We’ve taken the approach of going toward the smallest cited bend in the industry in that color space; we’re trying to take the lead. But it’s pushing the state of the art to go to those types of bends.

The second point with regard to color is the stability of the color point over time. Again, this performance is something people are used to. I’m not that up on the lighting technology as it’s used today with fluorescence, exactly what kind of specifications exist. In our own office building, I believe I’ve seen an array of colors coming out of fluorescent tubes. So I’m not sure how well regulated all this is. But I do know that the lighting customers we have are very concerned about the stability of the LED’s chromaticity over time.

Euan Morrison: Color is an area that we’ve been looking at in some depth over the past year or so. Some of the more demanding applications for white high-brightness LEDs really demand high color rendering, in addition to the specific color temperatures that we’ve just been hearing about.

Typically the industry has moved to higher and higher lumens per watt, but the ability of sources to accurately render colors to high color-rendering indexes is being left behind a little bit. So high-brightness cool-white LEDs typically have relatively poor color rendition performance.

Now that’s in contrast to, if you like, conventional tungsten-halogen light sources; a tungsten-halogen light is a nice black body and it renders colors extremely well.

I think also pushing the general color performance up to a level where it’s useful not just for some of these highly specialist lighting areas, for example, medical, but also it’s the case in general lighting that the cool-white LEDs tend to look a little bit harsh. And, of course, the warmer-white LEDs tend to not have as high brightness, so you don’t tend to have the same lumens per watt output. I think this is an area we’ll see a lot of progress in the next few years.

Electronic Products: Robert, what do you hear from your customers? What are they telling you?

Robert Sagebiel: There’s a big need for high color-rendering capabilities, especially in what we call the commercial architectural lighting space and also in medical lighting applications.

But once you move out of that, you’re talking about things like portable lighting, where you’re looking for flashlight or hand torch applications. And while consistency from one LED to the next is important, especially the high-end products, today most of the product shipped in white tends to be in the flashlight market and that’s not quite as critical most end users don’t put two flashlights next to each other and compare the color temperature.

Jim Loeffler: Clearly as we move up into higher color-rendering capabilities, there’s almost always a tradeoff with efficiency, right? And so as LED efficiency goes up with time, of course it’s going to be easier to achieve higher color rendering, because you may be more accepting of that tradeoff.

But I think what’s really going to happen is you’re going to see levels of color rendering out of LEDs. Depending on the application and the performance demands for, as an example, typical outdoor lighting kinds of applications or portable like Bob mentioned, etc., you may optimize the LED for the maximum efficiency and not worry a whole lot about color rendering.

But in those applications where it’s more critical — whether it’s residential or consumer or medical applications — you may be more willing to give up efficiency to get higher color rendering. So I figure you’re going to see levels of color rendering, maybe 70%, 80%, 90%, or better, from the various manufacturers over time.

Less color sensitive

Richard Saffa: I think that Jim’s comment should be well taken. It exemplifies the fact that, while we’ve got challenges, whether it’s in color rendering or what have you, for most of the growth areas, the rest of the opto usage has the opportunity to proliferate in even broader markets, like portable flashlights that Bob mentioned and other areas.

The more our chips are used, the better it gets in terms of eventual cost. The proliferation of high-brightness LEDs, starting with the vast use of blue LEDs and in cell phones, had a very positive effect on everything else that we have today, in terms of market acceptance and the variety of uses, for the consumer.

Brian Hedayati: From the driver side, we thought we could help in the application, having consistent brightness and simplify some of the issues. That’s why we came up with drivers that you can actually program them in production. Depending on the LED bend you get, you can set the current levels at the end of the process by just programming the driver. So this type of driver can reduce some of the complexity of building these light sources.

Electronic Products: Certainly it will have an effect on brightness, but how would it also affect the color? Can you talk to how color and brightness are interlaced?

Brian Hedayati: I think we can address the brightness by mainly having the right current level for the right bend. The color rendering itself we can address by mainly using RGB types of LEDs and by just changing the brightness.

Electronic Products: Instead of having a single LED of one color, you blend by using an RGB LED to provide the color across the board. That’s an interesting idea. But don’t RGB LEDs have high output at very notchy frequencies, as opposed to a broad spectrum. Can we talk about using an LED that has separate color components but does not provide the full spectrum?

Euan Morrison: The RGB mixing technique is something that people use. We have seen mixing of warm white and different kinds of white with different colors as well to achieve this higher performance levels that are required in some of these more demanding color-rendering applications.

Certainly the ability to set the current levels accurately in production is clearly a useful thing to do, which enables you to effectively calibrate a light source and take out some of the manufacturing tolerances.

Robert Sagebiel: To your point, the big challenge with RGB is that they are very saturated colors so you get narrow spikes in the emission areas. But because those LEDs also change with respect to themselves and with time and with temperature, it’s a real challenge. So you need to drive those LEDs individually and also have optical feedback. Otherwise you’ll start to see a lot of the drifters: the blues degrade faster than say the reds, or the greens degrade faster.

It’s a real challenge doing that, but it does offer immense capability — warmer white or cooler white or any shade in between. There are upward of 16 million colors with an RGB solution, but not everyone has found it acceptable. People now move towards amber, or yellow, inclusion to provide a warmer light experience; it’s still early on in its application space.

Also, you are getting better proton conversion with white phosphors and blue LED sources than with an RGB solution, so you still don’t have quite the same level of output, just a wider spectrum of colors to work with.

Electronic Products: So you don’t have quite the output you have with a single source, is that correct?

Robert Sagebiel: At this point, yes.

Electronic Products: Or efficacy?

Robert Sagebiel: Absolutely. White phosphor technology is the real key to the jump in output levels that have been seen recently.

Crystal Lam: One application where color is very important is in LCD TV backlighting. So using RGB or RGG LEDs as the light source to replace the current CCFL is the trend trend. The use of RGB lighting will give you a very nice color contrast and stronger luminosity, but it also will complicate the driving circuitry design. So there is a tradeoff here.

Electronic Products: Okay, and I suppose that’s also the case where you need to have the optical feedback, the monitoring of the color to adjust the intensity on the different elements of the RGB in order to provide consistent lighting. So it’s generally a more complex system than having a single white LED.

Crystal Lam: Yes. It’s more complicated, but it will increase the efficiency a lot. I’m talking about removing the color filter, which absorbs about 30% of the light output from the CCFL or white-LED LCD backlighting.

Robert Sagebiel: I think that may also apply to projection LCD TVs versus direct view.

I think this conversation is an interesting illustration of how LEDs are bringing such benefit to the lighting industry. We just talked about a variety of different ways to get white here, whether it’s blue as a phosphor, whether it’s RGB, whether it’s RGYB, or any number of different permutations and ways to get there, right?

One of the real benefits that I don’t think we talk enough about, is the flexibility and the adaptability of LEDs to do so many different things, frankly in a lot of different ways. So depending on what your particular situation is and what you want to optimize for, there’s a best LED way to get there.

Electronic Products: And so in many cases it may be “back to the drawing board.” The way we used to think of things when we used other types of lighting is changing. We may want to go back to fundamentals and say, “Why do we do it that way? Why don’t we do it in a completely different way that optimized the use of this LED and actually we’ll end up in a better system overall.”

Paul Scheidt: I want to make a comment on that. Suppliers want to be unique, as we were talking about with the color-rendering ability of LED light sources. I think the future, at least for the short term, is going to be in the mixing of different color LEDs. Now I don’t know which method is the best or which one is going to be the winner, but I definitely have seen some companies go out and try to do that sort of thing, as opposed to waiting around for the LED manufacturer to make a more efficient light bulb.

For luminaries today, You probably get better results by mixing different whites together, rather than colors because the RGB’s output isn’t good for general illumination. It’s good to have the blue phosphor technique in there somewhere to give you a broad spectrum.

Robert Sagebiel: One other item to consider is that incandescent lighting has been around for over 100 years. I’ve been told by people who’ve been in that industry a very long time that there’s upwards of 50,000 different types of lamp light sources available for the design applications over that time period.

And while the 80/20 rule will probably apply [80% of the applications are probably satisfied by 20% of the lamps], you’re talking about a huge number of lamp types, lamp voltages, filament styles, that all have unique applications. The challenge is to realize that with LEDs we’re at the very beginning stage of this process and it’s certainly not going to happen in the next ten minutes.

Efficacy

Electronic Products: To switch gears here slightly though, I want to talk about the efficacy, or efficiency, of LEDs.

While it does seem that LEDs are one of the most efficient of light sources, efficacy is always an issue. Can we talk about efficacy and compare and contrast it with other types of lighting? Where do LEDs seem to have a particular efficacy advantage?

Paul Scheidt: One of the things we’ve seen from our own internal development is that the directional nature of LED light allows you to get more efficient at the total system level than any comparable light sources. With an incandescent, the best case scenario on the bulb is around 20 lm/W.

Then there’s a range of efficacies associated with the fixture itself, which can take an omnidirectional light source and make it directional. We’ve seen 30% to 70%, but generally it’s being called 50% on average on all those kinds of things. Currently people in lighting are thinking about replacing incandescent with CCFLs, so you’re replacing a 20-lm/W light source with a 60- or 65-lm/W light source.

But you’ve still got that 50% loss with the fixture itself. So that really hampers the efficiency of the total system. Whereas in directional lighting applications, LEDs offer a chance to get you more efficient at the system level.

Electronic Products: You bring up an interesting issue: the fact that LEDs are directional and incandescent and fluorescent lamps are omnidirectional. Are there applications in which that omnidirectional aspect of the light source is critical?

Richard Saffa: I think in most of those cases you can overcome it with reflective and other ways to manipulate the light in the application.

Jim Loeffler : I think that’s true, but I think the other part of the paradigm is what people expect to see out of a light source. There really aren’t that many applications out there, at least common applications, where “omnidirectionality” (if that’s a word) is necessary. It’s what currently exists and so people are used to seeing it. They’re used to seeing, say, a light on a ceiling fan in their living room that sheds light in all directions. The reality is, it’s wasting a lot of light, a lot of energy, and that’s not good. But that’s what people are used to seeing, and so that’s they want.

So I think consumer education is needed with respect to LEDs, because it’s better to not light up all those areas.

Electronic Products: The reality is that most lighting in the home tries to add directionality to the light, like the desk lamp. Even the lighting fixture in the ceiling fan aims to light the bottom half of 180 not a full 360°—you don’t really want to light the ceiling.

With LEDs there’s a obviously much higher efficiency, and that could result in incredible energy saving across the population, couldn’t it? Wouldn’t LED lighting save a lot of energy, be much greener?

Paul Scheidt: You’re talking about the conflict that we’re seeing. There are a lot of lighting suppliers that we’re engaging for the first time who don’t want the light source to look different than they’re used to. So even though there is directionality, and everybody will agree this is where the light should be going, when they actually look at a prototype or whatever, they want it to look the way they think their customers expect. They aren’t going to buy unless it looks like the existing sources, so you wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at it that it is an LED fixture as opposed to a bulb based fixture. Whether you’re right or not stands to be proven, but I agree there’s a lot of education that needs to happen.

Jim Loeffler: I spent the first part of my career working in the LED industry with automotive exterior lightingtaillights and stoplights and all that kind of stuff. And what I find kind of interesting is that I think the same paradigms apply.

When that industry started about 10 or 15 years ago, people would bury a bunch of LEDs in a taillight and cover it up with the thickest red lens they could get, because what they really wanted to do was make it look like a bulb. If it looked different than a light bulb, then they went back and tried to redesign the optics to make it look more light a light bulb.

Here we are about 10, 15 years later and now, of course, you see cars showing off their LEDs, whether it’s clear lenses, whether it’s showing the individual points of light, or other unique types of optical appearances.

I think the reality is that the general lighting market will probably make that same transition, but it will take some time.

Electronic Products: So it’s show me first that you can do what I’ve already done and, after you’ve done that, then you can show me what you can do?

Jim Loeffler: A little bit of that, but I think it’s more just breaking the paradigms. This is how we’ve always done it so we’ll continue to do it that way.

Cost vs. total cost

Robert Sagebiel: Just a couple of other items here, you’re really talking about energy efficiency but it’s actually total cost of ownership because today when you look at the greatest energy savings for the world it’s really replacing incandescent with LED.

However, most incandescent applications tend to be home consumer applications, the 360 light bulb in the table lamp or in your ceiling lamp or wherever. And that’s the group that’s most sensitive to initial purchase cost versus total cost of ownership.

Compact fluorescent lamps have struggled for 20 years, both good and bad, to overcome their use with a product that’s essentially almost as energy efficient as an LED and one-fifth its cost. But the CFL just was not adopted because it was different, or people didn’t understand it, or it was too expensive to purchase in that initial installation.

When you look at commercial lighting today, most of that is fluorescent. If you look at office buildings, they’re already utilizing 2- and 4-ft fluorescent lamps. In that case, the cost tradeoff in replacing fluorescents with LEDs isn’t quite as good as the incandescent argument. And that’s the irony, because there would be greater energy savings with incandescent replacements, but the group you want to make the replacements is the least likely to do it.

Electronic Products: Well there are a couple of issues and one is the form factor, whether you can actually create an LED which literally goes into place the same way an incandescent would go into place, so that you don’t have to change the fixture, you can just change the bulb. I don’t know if it’s possible to do that, but I do see a lot of people trying to come up with Edison-base LED bulbs.

Robert Sagebiel: That’s a big challenge, too, because the Edison-based solution was designed as a heat radiator, you know, the heat escapes out of the fixture. Conversely for LED solutions you have conducted heat; you really need a more effective thermal solution that would conduct heat through the socket. Incandescent sockets today tend to be plastic or at best ceramic, which acts as an isolator/insulator more than anything else.

So from a commercial/architectural/residential lighting standpoint, you’re really looking at new fixtures that maximize the LED solution value versus trying to retrofit. And therein lies a big issue of adoption, because everybody’s got this invested, installed solution, set up for screw-in bases and twist-in fluorescents.

That’s not going to change real fast with the exception of things like California’s Energy Efficiency Ratings Title 24. But quite frankly, if we had to wait for the government to drive this change, we’ll all be pretty close to retired by that point in time and I can’t wait that long.

Electronic Products: Well what do the statistics look like on the return on investment, the payback time? If I decide to take out a fluorescent fixture today and replace it with a new fixture that’s for an LED, does anyone have a feel for what how soon my energy savings start to pay me? And also there’s obviously a manpower cost involved too, because the frequency with which I have to replace those things, and maintenance costs go down as well.

Paul Scheidt: I can speak to that. You know the louvers are hard. We’ve always been very careful when we’re talking about lighting applications that we separate parabolic louver fixtures specifically from our discussion, because they are very efficient and they are very cheap. They have a very long life time relative to the other bulb technologies.

And so the truth is really most fixtures that are out there, the fixture problems I was talking about with the can light, don’t exist with the louvers generally. Louvers are over 90% efficient as far as optical efficiency. And so you’re talking about a fluorescent tube which depending on the type and so forth, can be definitely at least 80 lm/W currently (generally they’re a little bit higher, between 80 and 100 lm/W), so then you have a pretty darn good fixture efficiency on top of that.

And so if you add up the cost and everything, I don’t think we’re at the point today to be able to address those types of lighting applications. There are people working on some retrofits of LEDs I know, but I think that’s mainly addressing the mercury concern.

There are a lot of sub-issues. Right now I think it’s very much driven by green concerns more than anything else. There are worrisome things about fluorescent tubes: the mercury in fluorescent lighting would be just one of the concerns that’s driving LEDs.

Green effects

Electronic Products: We see concern about greenness growing pretty rapidly within the United States. But are people willing to sacrifice economically for the green benefit?

Paul Scheidt: I’ve looked at some research on lighting technology across the world, and it’s kind of weird that the United States is the last bastion of incandescent lighting. Incandescent bulb sales are plummeting around the world basically everywhere except the United States. We’re the last country in the world that’s pretty much getting on the CFL bandwagon.

Asia and Europe for the most part have already switched. I’ve read that China never even really got started with incandescents because of all the energy problems they have over there. The energy efficiency of their lighting is a concern and so they’ve always been drawn to fluorescent, I mean apart from the color temperature as well.

Jim Loeffler : I think from an LED perspective what Paul just pointed out is probably a great opportunity in some ways for LEDs. Because, let’s face it, comparing LEDs versus fluorescent, or maybe more specifically compact fluorescent, that’s a much tougher improved-payback-time scenario to come up with. It’s much easier to do the math for the payback of LEDs versus incandescent.

Now you may have difficulties, as (Bob) brought out, getting past the initial purchase cost, right, but in some ways the fact that in the United States still something like —– I think I read where 40% of energy devoted to lighting today is still coming from incandescent bulbs in the U.S. That 40% is an opportunity for LEDs if we could figure out how to get there and how to bring the cost down rapidly enough to make it attractive to consumers.

Electronic Products: That’s true. But at the same time I do see that you’ve got major competition, more and more competition from the complex fluorescent folks who are pushing more heavily and I do see some results in that, more people being aware of them.

And actually the people are more happy with the quality from the newest compact fluorescents, the color’s s more similar to the incandescents that they’re replacing. So that’s a tough battle.

But if you look at the garbage heaps, LEDs win hands down. Their longevity is such that I think they beat every other lighting source. There may be issues about recycling, how you can recycle LED light sources, that haven’t yet been addressed.

Robert Sagebiel: To that point, LEDs are winning against fluorescent but twe have to pick and choose our battleshey have to be pick and choose your battles. As I mentioned before, I doidn’t want to wait for the government to decide when the market was going to be prime.

Quite frankly, Wal-Mart has probably done more to launch LEDs into fluorescent replacement applications that any government activity or any other change out there and that was with the use of LEDs to replace fluorescents in refrigeration applications. Sinceapplications.Since fluorescents are notoriously low efficiency at low temperature, as in refrigerator applications, they’re stepping up to the plate and saying “All right, there is a case for LEDs in this application.”

As to the point of total cost of ownership, I don’t think the consumer in North America is really into initial- cost versus total- cost analysis. If it’s $0.50 to replace the incandescent, I’m going to spend $ 0.50 again, versus $5 to do a CFL or $50 for an LED.

Quite frankly, those applications where fluorescent has been used, both outdoors and indoors and low temperature applications, or where total cost of energy and total cost of replacement is factored in, that’s usually a business decision rather than an end-user preference.that takes a look at that. A good cost analyst gets in there and says, “Okay, it costs me $5 worth of incandescent bulbs over five years, or it costs me $15 to replace it once with an LED solution. But I don’t have to send a maintenance guy out there twice a year to replace that bulb.” He’s saving himself hundreds if not thousands of dollars in maintenance costs and energy costs.

Electronic Products: Yes, it’s definitely a much harder to sell for the general consumer, but I think there is an opportunity there. There are so many places where people have, say, ceiling fixtures that they hate getting up and replacing lights. It seems to me there needs to be a major campaign, on the level of something a GE or Phillips would launch, to convince the consumer that this is truly a better solution.

Robert Sagebiel: I think the challenge there is that GE and Phillips, while they’ve all taken steps in the LED direction, still have a fairly heavy infrastructure built around blowing glass bulbs, and they’re not about to back that off real fast.

Richard Saffa: The reality is that the LED community couldn’t supply the demand. If the world were suddenly to convert from those sources, the LED community couldn’t supply it all anyway, right? So it’s got to be a progression over time.

Electronic Products: That’s interesting. What is the growth rate on new facilities able to produce LEDs? When do you estimate that the capacity would be there for the LED to actually take on the of the incandescent world?

Jim Loeffler: I think that, you know, all of the LED manufacturers and all of the, call it, infrastructure manufacturers, along with the LEDs are foremost in a continual state of capacity expansion whether it be on the reactor side or on the packaging side.

And so I don’t know that at some point in time somebody’s got a flag out there that says in 2015 you can replace everything, but the overall industry capacity is increasing by leaps and bounds every year. And I think lighting adoption is going to be a transformation over time. It’s not going to be a step function. The industry should be able to respond to it.

Electronic Products: Does anyone know the increase in output rate?

Paul Scheidt: Cree made it easy for you. We had the press release a month or two ago saying we tripled our packaging capacity, so that gives you a hint of scale. ■

WEB REFER — For more on cost issue with solid-state lighting, plus additional discussions of environmental impact and lighting system infrastructure, visit our on line version of the forum at http://electronicproducts-com-develop.go-vip.net.