Lighting/Illumination Forum

Solid-state lighting can outshine CFLs and incandescents, but industry cooperation and standards are needed

CONVENED AND MODERATED BY RICHARD COMERFORD

In late October, Electronic Products held a forum to examine the state of lighting. The members were preponderantly people involved with solid-state lighting. This was due in no small part to the view that SSL now has extreme importance to the future of lighting and illumination.

Electronic Products : I’d like to begin by asking each of you to introduce yourselves and give us your view of what’s important and essential in this marketplace today. What are some of the key issues and what are some of the key advances that have been made?

Peter Resca (Director of Engineering, Astrodyne) : At Astrodyne, we provide a wide variety of switch-mode power supplies and more specifically LED drivers.

In terms of lighting in general, and more specifically solid-state lighting, where certainly we see the greatest amount of change and new innovation going on, the biggest challenges from the driver side that we see are to meet these diverse applications as they emerge as well as keep up with the changing LED characteristics and what it takes to drive them. I’m sure some of the panel members here will have great things to say about the LEDs themselves.

As a secondary sort of point that we keep an eye on and we will also refer to later is the government regulations and changes; that’s been an important driver in solid-state lighting as well.

Kee Yean Ng (Worldwide Product Marketing Manager for Solid-State Lighting, Avago Technologies) : As many of you are aware, Avago Technologies has its roots dated all the way back to Hewlett-Packard, then Agilent, and then Avago Technologies.

Our company supplies all kinds of LED components ranging from a standard low-power material, to the latest high-power LED devices. I’m kind of fortunate to have been in this industry for about 20 years now, so I have experience from the early days of the GaAsP, GaP technologies — the low-brightness LED stuff — up to now with the very exciting new blue and white InGaN power LEDs.

From my perspective, we are at a very exciting point. LED technology and LEDs have progressed by leaps and bounds, from a semiconductor materials standpoint, to increasing in efficiency and light output, and also from the standpoint of packaging. Packaging has been improved to be able to handle more that 1 A, so this has certainly been exciting.

And, of course, the general goal would be to penetrate into the general lighting industry. That still remains the goal, and it is still not an easy goal to achieve for a variety of reasons. What I find is many companies or many individuals have kind of jumped onto the LED bandwagon to take advantage of power LED technology, yet lack the knowledge on how to use LEDs.

So basically between the LED supplier and the luminaire manufacturer there seems to be a gap. There’s a gap which can be bridged in a form of a standard or that can come in the form of education between the two parties. So from my viewpoint that’s one area which I think we have to address in order to bring LEDs to the general public.

Paul Scheidt (Product Manager for LED Components, Cree) : At Cree, LED components covers everything from ovals, rounds, P4s, and surface-mount high-brightness parts all the way to the XLamp high-power LED product line. And what we see going on right now is very exciting. We’ve always been focused on general illumination market. We are a pure-play LED company; we don’t have any existing bulb business to worry about in pursuing the general illumination market and so we’re very excited about what’s going on in the marketplace now and the adoption that we’re seeing in a lot of different lighting applications.

One thing that’s been in the forefront recently that you can see mainstream adoption of LED technology is in portable lighting. If you go to most places now and look at flashlights, it’s getting pretty hard to find ones with incandescent bulbs in them. There weren’t a lot of LED flashlights available for sale two or three years ago and now it’s hard to find one that doesn’t have an LED in it in some form or another.

I mention that to put things in perspective when we talk about mainstream adoption of LEDs for indoor and outdoor lighting, which a lot of people are talking about. There are certain applications for LEDs where they have reached complete mainstream adoption, so, we’re pretty enthusiastic about looking at those sort of niche wins and looking forward to what’s going to happen in the general illumination environment for things such as outdoor lighting and certain indoor lighting applications as well.

I’ll agree with Kee that there is still some lack of knowledge in the integration levels needed to create really good LED lighting products. I’m sure we’ll discuss that further.

Brian Moody (Senior Marketing Manager, The Lighting Group, Cypress Semiconductor) : The Lighting Group at Cypress Semiconductor has a vertical structure that leverages our programmable mixed signal array technology, PSoC, in the lighting area. I’ll reiterate some of the comments that Paul and Kee made: what we’re seeing as a major challenge is a lack of total system-level expertise that our customers have when designing lighting systems.

As an IC vendor, we’re being pushed into areas that have traditionally been the domain of our customers; system level issues on how to design fixtures and dealing with thermal issues, the changing LED characteristics, and optical considerations. That’s the primary issue and a barrier we need to overcome. We need to really become experts in all aspects of the system to help our customer adopt the technology.

Donato Montanari (Vice President, LED Drivers and Power Management ICs, Leadis Technology) : One thing that happened a few days ago which I think is very important for our business is that Apple introduced their new Mac book. They have a video on their Web site where they talk about this product and its features. One of the four critical features is LED backlighting. And I think that’s really important because Apple is exposing consumers to the advantages of LED backlighting.

In terms of challenges for LED makers the most significant one is heat and, as Kee mentioned, the packaging is very, very important and difficult. For us in the driver front, I think that we need to be able to make drivers that they are more intelligent and programmable.

Alexei Erchak (Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Luminus) : For those that don’t know us, Luminus Devices makes a very-large-area LED, so this is an LED that puts out kilolumens of light.

What we try to do is look at what kinds of applications are introduced and enabled by having this much brighter solid-state light source available and we found some nitch applications in DLP television and in LCD backlighting and now we’re finding quite a few in general illumination as well, we’re finding applications in architectural lighting and theatrical lighting and many applications where you really want as much light as possible coming from a single source, so those are applications where the luminous devices are flat-like devices are a very good fit.

I think that in general, LED performance is really doing quite well: I mean there’s 100, 150 lm are readily available out there. Now the attention is turning to cost to get widespread adoption of LEDs. As soon as you start talking about cost, you can’t just worry about the cost of the LED;, you got to worry about the cost of the system and the performance of the system. So that’s where a lot of the attention is turning towards right now.

Rodney Bailey (VLED Engineering Manager, Optek) : Optek’s been a total system solution integrator for about 35 years, but in infrared light; about five years ago we moved into the visibles. What Optek does is build the solution for a customer.

From an engineering perspective, the light output is heading toward 200 lm. We’ve gone from 40, to 60, to 100 and now I hear somebody’s got 155 out there, so eventually it will be 200. It’s like a designer can go to Home Depot for what your application needs; you’re going to pick what light level you want and then go from there.

So now we see two other things becoming important from an engineering standpoint. One is that color temperature is becoming paramount in the white light. As more and more LEDs get put into applications, the user is becoming aware that there’s a range of color temperatures — from blue to yellow — in white light, and it’s become apparent that the binning of these devices needs to be a little bit tighter.

The other is thermal management. There are a lot of people that want to just buy LEDs like a component and they have to come up with their own heat-sink designs. From our standpoint, we understand what it takes; we monitor junction temperatures in the application each time we build a solution for somebody.

My point is that: the standards for our industry need to be improved. The various standard organizations need to come up with something so that we can prepare suppliers, so that they know how to deliver each one of these solutions to the customer.

Marc Dyble (Product Marketing Manager for Solid State Lighting Business Unit, OSRAM Opto Semiconductors) : As you probably know, OSRAM has a pretty large portfolio of products, ranging from 10s of millicandelas to over 1,000 lumens in some cases, so we see a large gamut of adoption with LEDs over numerous market segments.

Some of the essential things we see are the requirements for high-quality white light, from the standpoint of color quality, color stability, uniformity, binning; these and other factors that are well-characterized for incumbent light sources, and need to be applied to solid-state lighting.

And then there’s the need to reduce costs: of the component, in terms of dollars per lumen, as well as in the form of integration of controls. While we see lots of people adopting LED sources, there are still questions about how you use them within existing control architectures. We see a lot of progress, a lot of good things happening in the industry, but there are obviously some things we need to continue to work on.

Electronic Products : Kee, can you talk to us about efficacy of LED devices, where they stand today?

Kee Yean Ng : Although Avago does not have a wafer fab for high-power LED devices, certain power LEDs are being manufactured and these devices right now, as I think as many of the participants have mentioned, can get more than a hundred lm, for example 150, 155 lm, but by and large I think many of the devices today, probably center around the 80 lmW kind of range.

So for those high-power niche applications needing high output that exceeds 100 lm, 150 lm for example, those parts will cost more. In terms of efficacy and depending on the power input roughly 1 to 1.2 watt, we are looking at an efficacy now approaching in excess of 100 lm/W if you consider the high output of more than 100 lm/W.

Paul Scheidt : Well, across the board in our white XLamp products we are in 90 lm/W in terms of efficacy in cool white and in warm white probably around 70 m/W. So even just raw light source to light source, the LEDs available are more efficient than compact fluorescents (which are usually around 60 to 65 lm/W) even in the warm white space.

Then you also have to factor in the application; if you’re talking about something like a down-light application, light directionality favors LEDs heavily. As you can see in some products, like the Cree LR6 and the Renaissance Lighting down lights, the delivered efficacy of the system is actually much higher than what you can get out of a CFL. Even though you might think that the LEDs aren’t that much more efficient at the light source level, in practice, when you integrate them into the system, then the delivered lm/W is much higher than for CFL.

Electronic Products : I would take it that for lighting broad areas CFLs might still have some advantage, where you’re looking at a wider angle of light distribution.

Paul Scheidt : There are different tools in the toolbox. I mean we’re pretty cognizant of the fact that for some lighting applications, if you’re looking for an omnidirectional light source, then generally the CFL in practice may be a little bit better because it is omnidirectional. But real lighting applications are mostly directional in nature, and that usually puts the advantage towards the LED.

Rodney Bailey : From the standpoint of efficacy, everyone puts down a number on the data sheet and we hope that we can compare supplier to supplier for what we might need. But really you can’t count on the efficacy until you’ve put the LED into the application and you look at the heat-sinking capability. Heat sinking and thermal resistance of the package have a big impact on efficacy.

We’re finding that the number on the data sheet is not necessarily a good application number. If the application needs more light, you put more LEDs in it, it gets a little bit warmer, and you have to add more design time to get the heat out. So for efficacy, the design of the fixture that the LED goes into is a real important part of the application.

Marc Dyble : To Rodney’s point, understanding application conditions is key to designing an LED system. OSRAM has announced 155 lm/W at 5,000 K, so the efficacy of the device is there, as I think Paul mentioned. Now it’s a matter of system design — being able to manage thermal performance, losses, optics, and other elements in your system — so that, from an overall, system-performance standpoint, you’re on par with incumbent technologies, which in most cases don’t have these things to deal with. With LEDs, it’s key to look at efficiency of both the device and the system.

Electronic Products : Alexei, you have a different type of LED lighting system: it’s a broad, flat area lighting. How does efficacy affect you and how do you see the issue of efficacy?

Alexei Erchak : We have to have high-lm/W devices just like everybody else and we’ve worked very hard on making sure that although you’re getting more light out on one of our devices, you still retain the efficiency of the small LEDs.

However, to reiterate what everyone’s been saying about application dependence, I think it’s impossible to make broad sweeping statements about efficacy of LEDs versus fluorescent lamps versus incandescent unless you’re talking about in the context of an application.

It basically becomes a tradeoff, involving total cost ownership, upfront costs, performance, and system level efficacy versus light source efficacy. All those factors have to be considered, and lighting is very nichey in that way, you need to look at the specific application.

Once you’ve got it narrowed down to, say, a high bay light, then you can compare a specific LED system to say, an HID lamp system. That’s where we can really have a useful discussion.

Electronic Products : Is there a role that the driver plays in maximizing efficacy of the LED?

Peter Resca : In terms of the driver I would echo back to some of the opening statements in terms of education and that gap between the integrators and the LED providers. And you know, what we see, and again we do sort of driving complete applications, but the important thing there from our point of view is that the integrator is utilizing the LED in its proper way — at its proper ratings and recognizing its characteristics — so the integration goes smoothly and gets the greatest impact in terms of efficacy, and total light output from the application.

Brian Moody : As Donato mentioned it specifically earlier, we see the need for intelligence in the drivers. We see the need for flexibility in the LED driver not only to drive the LED string, but also to manage the color quality and color stability. That’s how we see ourselves providing value to the luminaire manufacturers.

Donato Montanari : Like everybody said, it really depends on which specific application you’re talking about. For instance, in a portable application, the driver that controls the backlight unit is 40-50% of the overall power budget and it’s pretty much the only chip that sits between the battery and the screen. So the LED driver chip and its features and functions have not only to deal with color temperatures and color quality but also battery life optimization.

Paying attention to energy efficiency and power savings is critical. For instance, the way that you can go in and out of standbys and do other little tricks that save little amounts of current are very, very important. And that’s what a good LED driver does.

Electronic Products: You mentioned color and color temperature and earlier the binning was brought up. One of the things that is important for general lighting applications is LED-to-LED color consistency. Would anybody like to discuss that?

Marc Dyble : Sure. I think binning is very critical, especially when you look at incumbent sources; fluorescents use a precise, four-step MacAdam ellipse target [a measure of noticeable color difference]. Being able to provide customers with equivalent standard deviations in white light is important, so that when they are doing a down-light wall-wash application, they can have uniform light throughout their entire installation.

Reducing the binning size and introducing fine binning for LEDs, for example, allows customers to do just that. By taking only the LEDs that they can use, whether it be mixing devices from several bins or pulling from just one bin, they can create a very uniform look across their entire design.

Paul Scheidt : On this topic again I’ll tie back in with all of our discussions about the application. On one hand you have the chromaticity binning being very important for certain applications, mainly the applications where we don’t have a lot of room for mixing between LEDs. I think the worst-case scenario for this type of thing is a linear wall-wash application where there’s no room to mix light between LEDs. So then the LED-to-LED consistency becomes very important.

However there are a bunch of other applications where there’s a lot of room for color mixing. You can think of a parking-lot light 15 feet in the air, there’s 15 feet of space to color mix. You can think of a down light, there’s some down lights out there that do a lot of recombination of light. There’s a lot of reflection inside the fixture before it exits the fixture.

So in these types of instances it becomes possible to mix different bins together. It depends a lot on the system design as to how important this LED-to-LED consistency is because there are a lot of solutions that are available at the system level for this problem.

Kee Yean Ng : There is another alternative to control the color consistency. One way is from the LED suppliers’ end binning to what the customer wants, binning to the intended application, but there are certain applications whereby binning alone is not good enough, for example, in LCD backlighting.

With an LED-based LCD backlight, because of changes in light output and chromaticity with temperature and also with life, it is quite impossible to maintain a consistent white color point, so some form of an optical feedback control system has to be implemented. Such a system is already established, it’s available in the market now. My point is, the customer should consider this alternative if they want to control color consistency because there’s no easy way to maintain the color point for LCD backlight, for example.

Electronic Products : That is an excellent solution in some applications, but it seems to add a layer of complexity to the lighting system and go against the need to reduce cost. Since providing consistent color seems to involve process control in the manufacturing, I’m curious what’s happening with regard to understanding and controlling process today. But to take the first issue, the idea of using color control feedback systems, where does that really fit in for everybody?

Alexei Erchak : Kee’s actually absolutely right about the need for a color control in LCD units in order to retain a lot of the benefits in color consistency. But you’re right of course, again it is application dependent; color control is not going to make sense in a lot of general lighting applications.

What we did was try to find common ground to deal with the cost challenge as well. Because if you have a large screen that has thousands of LEDs, and you have to control all of them, that layer of complexity is prohibitive even in LCDs; consumer electronics is no easy playground either as far as cost goes.

Our approach was to use a few of our flat light LEDs along the edge of the screen. That not only got the component cost down, it also got the color-control complexity down as well and that allowed us to find some common ground to help solve the cost issue. So that was just one approach that we took to deal with that.

Marc Dyble : With regard to control of color in manufacturing, traditionally the only way to consistently produce sufficiently large volumes of white LEDs in the desired bin range was to increase the quantity of LEDs produced and discard outliers.

One thing OSRAM has been doing for greater chip-to-chip consistency is to steer the process so that you know what your end results will be. That eliminates the need for a lot of excess yield and reduces overall costs.

Paul Scheidt : To that point: for the last year and a half Cree has actually been selling the smallest chromaticity “real estate” in the warm and neutral white color space. We’ve aligned our bins to the ANSI chromaticity standards that are part of the Energy Star SSL standard. That’s been an important process characterization improvement that we’ve had in focusing our products on the general illumination market.

We were just talking about how color control feedback adds cost to a certain application, but when people are talking about buying more consistent LEDs, then reducing the amount of distribution you’re buying from an LED supplier can also increase cost. It’s the same sort of principle, you pay more to get more control over the process.

Also we have experience in using the color control; the Cree LLS products like the LR6 Can Light use active color feedback control because they’re mixing white and red LEDs;. it’s integrated in that system. If you’re looking for consistent light output over time, especially in terms of color points, then yes, that is a very attractive option.

Electronic Products: Good point Paul. I hadn’t for one considered that but that’s true, the cost trade off does involve the fact that if you do want more consistent LEDs you’re going to pay a premium to get that.

Paul Scheidt : I can continue on that point a little bit to say that regarding adoption of LEDs in general lighting, everybody can pretty much agree that the costs will have to come down eventually. While we do want to increase consistency, we also don’t want to do it at the penalty of increasing the cost to the end customer. I think the people that are going to be most successful in the next phase are the people that can both manage LED consistency and reduce costs – be able to use a full distribution of LEDs in terms of chromaticity to then create end products that are cheaper as opposed to trying to tighten distribution or you know, getting into more controls.

Alexei Erchak : One thing that we’ve discovered is that there are some (this absolutely does not apply to all) applications in.which you do have some advantages if you only need to use one LED for your lighting applications. In those cases you don’t need to worry about matching LEDs to get the right color point, you just have one, you know exactly what the color point is, and, as long as you manage the thermals, that color point will stay fixed over time. So that is one advantage that we’ve seen in certain applications and I want to emphasize that because it can also be a disadvantage, other applications you benefit from using many different LEDs and trying to kind of broaden out that color distribution so again it’s very application dependent but I just wanted to throw that in there.

Donato Montanari : Of course system cost is critical. One way to reduce system cost is to increase the logic and intelligence on the driver so that you can live with less LED’s and external components. One thing that we do in our RBG drivers is to embed a lot of logic and intelligence that allow us to do temperature compensation and monitoring of the color temperature of the LED’s. And that of course is just a little bit of additional cost to the driver itself but potentially can reduce the overall system cost.

Electronic Products : Let me inject this too. There’s been mention several times of a gap between the suppliers and the users in the terms of knowledge. How do you see the gap, where do you see the disconnect, and how does it affect the need for consistency within lighting products.

Peter Resca : Sure. I think actually it’s been echoed by a number of people but I think Brian actually earlier had referred to the fact that from a supplier side you the need to be a little bit of a thermal expert, a little bit of an electronics expert, a little bit of an optics expert and I think all of us in our individual roles and missions are trying to support the integrators as they sort through those different aspects of the application and integration of the LED into a solid state fixture, or down light, or whatever the application might be.

So I think individually we’re each trying to understand the other aspects of it to support our customers and I think it’s a learning process. I think it’s a continuing process and I think what makes it more difficult is the fact that the LED market itself has had so much advancement and so much you know, maturation as the light output of individual LEDs has grown exponentially and as the color has gotten so much broader and better it’s a constant learning curve that we’re all on.

Electronic Products : I would imagine there aren’t a lot of people with say 20 years experience in designing LED lighting, so that there’s a brave new world out there for a lot of designers who are using those technologies for the first time.

Marc Dyble : To elucidate on that: we see a lot of people currently making fluorescent fixtures who want to get into this business. But they’re saying “ Hold on, this is a little bit more challenging than we originally anticipated.” So we’ve developed a network of key strategic partners to facilitate their transition.

I think the key is not only education, as was mentioned earlier, but also giving people the resources they need to be successful, and not design a product that will ultimately fail. There isn’t a long history with this technology, and there are growing pains that need to be addressed.

Electronic Products : I would think that the market now seems ripe for two things. One seems to be educating people how to use these devices in new ways, and the second one is actually forming loose partnerships with other people who are supplying heat syncs, drivers, and other such things in order to help bring products to the marketplace. What do you gentlemen think about that?

Kee Yean Ng : Let me give you my perspective. Continuing on this discussion on the gap I believe that educating the end user is an ongoing process, it’s very important and I can give you some examples.

For one, if you look at the data sheet of an LED as written by the LED supplier, it’s important to note that, the characteristics are given at a certain temperature — most of the time 25 degrees room temperature — and that’s hardly the case in the actual use condition. I mean, the LEDs are probably experiencing way higher than 25°C, probably 80° or 100°C.

So the customers don’t get the light output they want in their product and that is due to the light output dropping because of temperature rise. So it’s really very important to read more into the data sheets, typically there is a light output versus temperature characteristic graph, which you need to see how much light output has dropped at your operating temperature.

So I really think it is important that customers be educated in this area so that they are not disappointed with the LED technology, I believe LED technology is the way to go in the future, so we want to make sure that the technology gets properly designed-in.

Donato Montanari : I would like to follow up on what Kee just said. In general, every time you try to introduce a new technology, you always have to educate customers and, more importantly, you have to make things simple for them, because they just want to deal with the same level of complexity that they had before.

And the most efficient way to make their lives easy is to provide a full, turn-key solution not just the driver, not just the LED, not just the heat sink or the package, but the whole system design. It is particularly important to do so at this stage.

Rodney Bailey : I think we’re getting two sets of customers out there. We’re getting the customers that are realizing that they need to get into this the LED market because they have to or they’re going to be behind and currently they do not understand very much about the LED itself.

You get the other customer that’s starting to get a lot smarter about VLED applications. They are not only realizing that they can get a consistent color temperature out there from some supplier, some are better than others and the availability of the ones that can do it are putting the hurts you might say on the other suppliers making them to get tighter bins during their testing procedure. There are improvements in the processes where the application of the phosphor over the blue dye is getting much better so the suppliers can actually target the bin that they want and not have such a broad range.

But what I’m finding out is there’s another group of suppliers out there that have realized that the color temperature doesn’t necessarily stay consistent once they get it into not only the fixture but also the application. And we are having to prove what the mixing of a light looks like after it’s actually in place in the fixture. We have to do a better job of working with the suppliers that supply the LED to build a solution for this end customer.

Electronic Products : Let me see if I understand you. You’re saying that there’s the application itself and the fixture is actually affecting the color temperature of the device because, I guess, of thermals and driving voltages, is that correct?

Rodney Bailey : That’s correct. You get affected by both the current and the temperature of the device that it’s running at. It jumps in temps or the higher it gets, the more delta you get in the color temperature.

Brian Moody : If I could just add to that, I think it’s been pretty well established here that people see that LED binning is a problem, and although it’s getting better, it still has a ways to go. I think what this really speaks to is the need for real time adjustments in lighting applications to compensate for the color shift over time. And that’s where really having intelligence in the fixture, actually within the LED driver itself, is valuable to the lighting system companies, and we see this as a need going forward.

Electronic Products : Interesting, having that ability in the driver itself. But it seems that you always have to make trade-offs; for instance, if you’re affected by current heating effects, then you have to trade off some level of brightness in order to control heat by controlling current. Is that how you manage to keep control of let’s say color consistency by trading off current/temperature?

Rodney Bailey : Well yes, they go hand in hand, more current more temperature. You have to do a better job at your fixturing and the design and actually in some cases you have to orient the fixture in such a way that you can maximize the convection air flow to maximize your heat dissipation of the product.

So there’s a lot of things going into keeping the color temperature consistent, not only by the part’s thermal resistance capability but also the device that has the tightest CCT binning control on it and there are some really good ones out there.

So when we build with a Cree device or an OSRAM device or one of the Far East devices, we pick the one that has the best consistency over time at a specified junction temperature and we can pick and choose which device. So this is hurting the other suppliers that don’t have these capabilities.

Marc Dyble : With regard to Rodney’s comments: when designing a fixture, a lot of people don’t take into account the in situ environment. So when designing a down-light fixture, they might measure its performance in an ambient, 25ºC environment. But once you actually install it, into an insulated ceiling can, for example, your actual ambient temperatures may be many times higher than what you tested it at in your laboratory. Thus it doesn’t perform the way your datasheet indicates.

By using a well-defined, standard test environment and test process, test measurement procedures like IESNA LM 79, you can then publish data knowing that it reflects product performance in the target environment.

Electronic Products : I think we seem to be backing into this, but what seems to be underlying a lot of these performance issues are standards and measurements issues, and even physical design standards: what the fixtures have to be able to deal with in drawing away heat. Can we talk to the issue of the state of the standards in the LED industry today? What’s missing out there?

Paul Scheidt : I don’t know why you want to talk about what’s missing. I think we should first applaud the work of the Department of Energy on their Energy Star SSL standards.

Electronic Products : Fair enough. Give credit where due.

Paul Scheidt : They definitely go a long way for solving most, a great majority, of the problems that we’re dealing with now. It’s not to say that more standards won’t show up later, but at least as of this second I would say that IESNA LM-79 is going to go a long way towards fixing manufacturer claims that just are patently false.

We’re in the process of trying to retrofit our headquarters in Durham, North Carolina, with all LED lighting; every single light fixture is going to LED lighting. So we’ve bought a whole bunch of lighting fixtures that use LEDs, and a great majority of them do not do anything close to what they claim they do on the outside of the box.

So we’re not just saying it’s a problem, we know it’s a problem, based on the experiences of buying these products. Even if they use our LEDs and we think they should be good designs, there are lots of ones that we see with terrible designs, where the LED’s getting extremely hot. We saw one where the driver was only 30% efficient, so two thirds of the power is wasted in the driver. I mean there was a lot of really bad stuff out there.

Alexei Erchak : I have a question for you. Are you saying that basically putting these standards in place really goes very far to closing the gap between the suppliers and the customers?

Paul Scheidt : I would say between the people making the fixtures and their customers. Now I mean there’s still the issue of between LED suppliers and the other component suppliers and the people making the fixtures, I think those are two separate issues.

Alexei Erchak : I guess I’m just trying to understand how important the standard issue really is. So we have the Energy Star standards, okay those are in place, they’ll be adopted. Won’t there still be this education that has to happen? Won’t there still be challenges in terms of people adopting these fixtures? I mean you said you’re retrofitting Cree, but you’re sophisticated customers, right? You understand how to deal with LEDs and you’re not your typical customer, right?

Paul Scheidt : That’s granted, but I mean we’ve had situations through our LED promotional programs, such as LED City or LED Workplace, where people ask us to give recommendations on fixtures. And we’ve been on the open water with everybody else right now.

So I think it’s great that we’re going to have this program in place where there are certified fixtures. Energy Star SSL is a pretty all encompassing spec, and so having something out there that is Energy Star certified says a lot about the design of the fixture, its efficiency and its quality.

Because we’re going from nothing to actually having Energy Star. I’m not claiming that stuff that’s Energy Star is going to be super perfect, but going from absolutely nothing to having Energy Star is a humongous step.

Rodney Bailey : Here in Dallas we’re getting some of the major electric companies starting to give rebates all across the city and I have a feeling it’s going to go all across Texas. Some of the rebates are substantial enough and what they are offering is that if you replace all of your outside lighting and interior lighting with LEDs, you’re going to get this rebate. So what’s happening now is that the power companies are going to start looking at what standards do exist and they’ll start coming up with some of their own.

We’re finding out that if the suppliers don’t abide by at least the standards that are out there, customers are going to put them in place themselves and then we’re going to have to meet them in order to do business with them.

One of the things that I think is missing in a lot of the data sheets that I look at is: what happens to the LED when you do drive it harder? What happens to color, temperature, dominant wave length when it gets hot? Because once you come up with these numbers then you can go to the fixture guys and they can understand what they’re going to have to do in order to be able to maintain the LED at a specific junction temperature and apply what drive level that they’re going to need for the application.

It’s getting tougher at least here in that the people that are asking for this are already starting to come to us and ask well what standard is out there. What would you guys be willing to own up to if we write a standard of our own?

Electronic Products : Bear in mind for a second that the general public is used to buying their lighting in terms of Watts, you know, 60 or 100-Watt bulbs, which really doesn’t make sense anymore for the world that we’re moving into. So this world of new standards will have to be introduced, and the general public educated. Then there are the internal standards for suppliers to be able to meet. So I think as Rodney said it’s a two-part process, that there are is two different things we have to talk to.

Energy Star I think is an important move because it does go to the point of saying okay here are some general standards as to how you can present performance and you have to meet to be able to claim that you are an efficient fixture. But I think there’s probably more work to be done in standards across the board.

Rodney mentioned something about this mandate which I’m interested in: these rebates on switching over to LED. Just so I understand it clearly, was this a rebate on using more energy efficient lighting or was it specific to LED?

Rodney Bailey : It was specific to LEDs.

Electronic Products : Okay, That’s unique because mandates typically just call for more energy efficient lighting and they don’t specify LEDs.

Rodney Bailey : I was told (and I haven’t got the actual verbiage from the lighting company) they are saying that LEDs are what they want. And so across the city of Dallas we’re seeing big inquiries into street lights and parking lot lights, things external to the building.

Electronic Products : And who’s actually enforcing a standard here or saying that things “meet our requirements?”

Rodney Bailey : I believe [utilities] are going to write their own to be honest with you.

Paul Scheidt : I will comment on that because we’ve been engaged with power companies here in North Carolina and also in California and they are very anxious because it’s so hard to build new power plants. They know that more energy demand is coming.

One of the local utilities here, Duke Power, says that energy efficiency is the fifth fuel. That’s one of the things they’re always talking about is that they can increase the amount of stuff that runs off electricity on their grid by being more energy efficient with stuff that is on the grid. And they really see the lighting as the low- hanging fruit that’s left right now. They are looking for ways to create these rebate programs around energy efficient lighting, and generally it’s been focused on CFL but a lot of them know that LED is coming.

The context behind this is that they can’t spend billions of dollars to go build a new power plant because of all the regulations that are in place, but they can spend billions of dollars giving people rebates to buy LED fixtures.

The utilities ask us: how do we know what is a good LED fixture? And that’s the importance of Energy Star SSL. Now we can say universally the products that are Energy Star certified are good and that would be the products that you would offer the rebates against.

I have a global perspective on this too, I mean we’re centered just on North America so far. One of our corporate marketing directors just got back from China and there’s a town, Tsing Tao (the same as the beer), and they have 14,000 LED street lights up right now. Here in America there are alternatives where we have enough power capacity to be able to run high-pressure sodium and metal-halide lights, whereas they’re building from scratch without the amount of overhead on the power grid that North America has.

And so the scenarios they’re facing in China is: you do LED street lights or you do nothing. Those are the choices that are being presented. So if you’re talking in terms of adoption, there’s a lot more going on in China than what you can just see here in North America.

Electronic Products : What’s kind of scary is that I believe that next year in Ireland, for example, they’re insisting that incandescent lights disappear. So some countries are going ahead at a very rapid rate and is that really the best thing for the industry at this point to mandate that people start tomorrow using more light efficient devices.

Marc Dyble : One thing to note here is that with very rapid, legislated requirements for LEDs we see more and more non-performing products on the market.

China has 54% of the world market in street lighting, a very high adoption rate due to power constraints there. But you see a lot of failures from sub-performing products on the market in that region. While a high adoption rate may be good for the industry, we need to maintain quality, building to Energy Star standards, for example, and qualifying luminaries, so they perform to a certain standard, at a certain level. You can’t just put things on poles that don’t perform like should.

Alexei Erchak : So the other slippery slope with going too fast with the adoption is, and I think a previous speaker was hinting at, that the adoption of poor color temperature, poor color quality LEDs is giving a bad reputation to LEDs and is kind of making some of the same mistakes that fluorescent lamps made. And kind of over the past year or two it seems like that has happened with a lot of the lighting fixtures out there, so I just wanted to put that out there and get some comments on that.

Just locally in the Boston area we had kind of an LED scandal. There was a town that lit up their big town- square Christmas tree with all LED lighting and they were making a big deal out of it being energy efficient. When they turned it on, it looked terrible and it was in the Boston Globe. Everybody that I talked to that had seen the article attached LED to poor lighting, basically terrible light quality. It’s just kind of a funny story, but there is risk there.

Electronic Products : That’s true; the fear is that you will give people the wrong impression by providing bad quality solid state lighting and set the industry back a ways. So your question Alexei is…

Alexei Erchak : Just to what extent have people seen that happening, I mean have people been running into that resistance — “Oh, I don’t want to use LEDs; those are really poor quality, poor color quality” — even at the outset?

Rodney Bailey : I hear the public saying that. When they see street lights that have half their LEDs out, or read in the paper about scenarios ike yours in Boston, they say why go to VLEDs. But I think that the end users that are actually going to build VLEDs into the fixtures, they see the good quality product out there and that’s what they’re asking for.

They’re not asking for that poor stuff, because now they want you to prove it out. They want you to do some long-term life testing. Now we’re getting up to 5,000 hours and my problem with that is, by the time I get to the end of 5,000 hours, there’s a new product out there that’s even better and more efficient.

So they’re asking us now to test out fixtures, run them up to the temperature that they’re going to use it. I think the end users don’t see poor quality as something they have to accept.

Electronic Products : I wonder how many people are actually aware of all of the LEDs that are being used in automobiles these days. People seem to have accepted these without even second thoughts. And they seem to have had a very good life unless I’m missing some stories. Yes?

Marc Dyble : The automotive industry was one of the earlier adopters as you know, with CHMSLs [center high-mounted stop lamps] and that sort of thing. Now we’re seeing, across the board, vehicle cabins lit with LEDs, not only panels and instrument clusters, but also ambient lighting. You’re even able to change the color of the interior ambient lighting, and that adds some market value.

So marketing not only to the car but now people are marketing towards, ‘Well what’s lighting my car? What’s inside my car?’ And it’s not just the bare lamp on the tail light for example, but we’re doing some aesthetics and such.

So I think we see that now from automotives first push we’ll see that move towards the general lighting area where we can you know, disseminate some of the traditional roles and methods to going out of the box a little bit in the way of how we design with LEDs.

Back to the point of color quality, we see a lot of LED applications using very cool temperature sources, 6,500 Kelvin for example, because of the efficiency, and the lumens you can get. But people’s reaction to that is, “Wow that’s too different from what I’m accustomed to!” Maybe it’s too blue, especially for an interior environment for residential. So I think residential or consumer groups are very particular about the color of lights. They know incandescent lights, they know to some degree fluorescent lighting; maybe they’re not too happy with CFLs, but the rebates are there, so they’re adopting them. So it’s a slippery slope: to provide a really nice quality source at a price they’ll buy.

Donato Montanari : I think generally consumers either want something that they don’t have in terms of features, like for instance the newest LCD with RGB back lighting which gives pictures on the screen that look much better, or they want the same features they had before but at at a much lower cost.

And it’s not clear to me whether or not LED technology right now can deliver better and/or cheaper than incumbent technologies in all applications. Maybe in some, but in all?

Alexei Erchak : Let me just answer that, I mean it can’t in all applications right now right. I mean it’s very specific to specific applications where LEDs win out and it’s for different reasons. So absolutely, across the board, there’s no kind of sweeping statement that can be made.

Rodney Bailey : I want to hit on that too. I don’t think the conversion from an incandescent to an LED is ever going to be cheaper, at least in the near run. But what you do find that’s cheaper is the maintenance cost and obviously the energy costs, those peripheral things that in the long run actually wins out over cost of product.

Electronic Products : Will LED lighting always be a fixture replacement and not simply a light source replacement, practically speaking?

Marc Dyble : We see two different roads here: the retrofit road model and the new luminaire development model. Designing your luminaire from the ground up is key to managing all the lifetime and thermal aspects of your design.

But ten years from now, when I need to replace the light, do I throw away the entire fixture? Or is it designed to have a replaceable component so that I can replace my LED light engine and put in a new one? There’s a fork between designing an entire fixture that you just discard when end of life is reached or replacing the component of that module for that luminaire. Perhaps what’s needed is a hybrid approach.

Electronic Products : Is there any move to get some kind of common interface for the light source and the fixture, the luminaire? Are there any standards coming out?

Marc Dyble : There are quite a few committees like NGLIA and others [NEMA, IES, IEC, ANSI, etc.] working on how you develop a new socket of sorts for LED technology. The Edison socket has been around for a long time, so what’s the nest step? Okay there’s are newer socket types for halogen, CFL, and other sources, but no standard for LED that all manufacturers can build off of.

As it stands now it’s unique to every manufacturer.

Paul Scheidt : A little history lesson, you know, I don’t know if people thought about this much but the Edison socket that we know and love and we consider a standard now was actually first patented. So there was a period of exclusivity for the Edison company on the screw-in light bulb. It was over a hundred years ago but still, it started out as a patented technology.

So I don’t know if it’s going to be through standards or if it’s just going to be somebody figuring out the best solution first. We do see a lot of adoption in LED light bulb technology that does screw in. We’ve seen a lot of adoption and some great progress in that area, and what can be done especially with thermal design. Usually the light bulb is the most challenging LED design in its thermal aspect.

Brian Moody : Just to add to that. Most of the luminaire customers that we’re dealing with are not overly concerned with replacement. I’ve heard comments that the light source is going to outlive the building. The more immediate issues are color quality and color stability. The feeling is that they’re not going worry about replacement at this point. I don’t know if other folks are seeing that as well but that’s been a common theme in our engagements.

Paul Scheidt : Absolutely.

And one of the things I think is funny is that we’re pretty confident as an LED supplier that LEDs are going to last 50,000 hours…

Brian Moody : Yep.

Paul Scheidt : …which in certain scenarios are going to be at least 10, maybe 20 or 30 years (especially if you’re talking residential applications) it’s going to extend that useful amount of time. Well if you look at current light fixtures and everything else that would go into the LED fixture, they don’t even come close to lasting that long, including the housing it comes in and the paint job on it, which are usually only warranted for ten years.

So the LED itself is the longest lasting component and so it seems confusing to us at least from our perspective as to why everybody’s so concerned about replacing the LED when it’s probably going to last the longest out of anything in that entire fixture.

Electronic Products : Yeah I guess that’s true. It’s just, we bring a mindset based on the use of carbonized cotton thread, that the unit is going to have to be maintained and that’s the light source is the lowest replaceable unit. I guess we have to start rethinking what is the replaceable unit and how often are we going to replace it. It may have more to do with the décor and deciding that you’ve lived with the same décor for five years and that’s too long, you have to replace everything.

Paul Scheidt : I think the best analogy now for the LED fixture solutions is that it’s going to be like laptops are today. Sure your laptops may still work in ten years, but in five or ten years, are you going to worry about trying to upgrade it or are you just going to go buy a new one? I think LED technology’s going to be at that same level or pace as what laptops have done in the last ten years – that’s what we’re going to see for the next ten years in LED fixtures.

Electronic Products : So the replaceable unit will be the fixture itself and we’ll have to get a new one every year because it’s advanced so much or…

Paul Scheidt : I don’t think it’s about every year, I think it’s every 10 or 15 years. In some cases the people who initially bought the unit won’t even be around to say where they got it, so you just go out and buy another one.

Electronic Products : That’s true, I was just going with the laptop analogy: if you have a laptop for more than a year it’s obsolescent so you have to get a new one. But I imagine yes you’re right, it’s the length of how long these things can actually last and it would be every ten years. I doubt that my wife or myself would want to live with the same décor for ten years; it would seem obsolescent to us after that point.

Paul Scheidt : And that’ll change depending on if it’s a commercial installation or residential installation. Commercial building owners are looking at payback periods, the life of the building, so they don’t want to change the lighting. Versus residential where the owner might say, “This weekend I feel like changing my lighting, Let’s do something different!” So there is a higher turnover rate essentially for residential than for commercial installations.

Electronic Products : That’s what Home Depot and others bet on, that there’s that kind of turnover. If you look at industrial applications, the thing is that thank heaven you don’t have to change LEDs for ten years; the cost savings in terms of maintenance is so enormous for that application — warehouse lighting, industrial lighting and various kinds of buildings — that it would seem to make the people involved with those applications most eager to adopt the technology today.

Rodney Bailey : I also think a lot of your malls — your shopping centers, your Walmarts, and things like that — see when the light goes out, they lose business because of it. So they’re looking to see this thing work when it’s supposed to work and they’re counting on not just the maintenance but on the selling aspect of the product that they’ve got lit up.

Paul Scheidt : If you want to talk beyond outdoor lighting, beyond indoor lighting, I think the next major segment to go would be exactly that: industrial, high-bay type of application.

And if you look at the dynamics that have been going on there in that industry, there’s been a lot of incentives provided by utility companies for people to switch off HIDs to more efficient fluorescent fixtures. I’ve heard of instances where the utilities are paying more than the price of the fluorescent fixture and bulbs; they’re essentially paying people to switch to fluorescent lighting.

But the problem then becomes, after those bulbs start wearing out after 10 or 15,000 hours, they have to keep up on the maintenance. And instead of one bulb per fixture, you’ve got six bulbs per fixture, and then you have to properly dispose of them, and there’s all this other headache that’s involved with maintaining those fluorescent fixtures.

And so the honeymoon period kind of wearing off in that space with the fluorescent fixtures, and, coincidentally, it’s about two or three years after fluorescents saw major adoption in those type of areas. [Two to three years would be about 10 to 15,000 hours of 24/7 use. EP ]

But I think that the business case of not having to go and maintain LED fixtures in that space is definitely going to be compelling for a lot of facility owners.

Electronic Products : Have any of you seen things that have surprised you in the last year? Are things going in different directions than you thought they’d be going?

Also, what is the impact of greening of America on the industry?

Rodney Bailey : I guess because of all the new ideas this VLED world opens to the imagination, to be honest I haven’t been surprised. Every time I turn around somebody is doing something with light that they could never do before with just incandescents or fluorescents.

For example, now they’re able to light up boats putting lights under the water. When a boat comes into dock from the ocean, normally it would come in with just its deck lights on. Now it can come in lighting up the whole area underneath the boat.

So I guess I haven’t been surprised by what people are coming up with.

Electronic Products : So the surprising thing is you haven’t been surprised because it’s all surprising.

Rodney Bailey : I guess so.

Marc Dyble : I agree with Rodney as well. I think there are areas where we were somewhat limited, for example, a surgical light: traditionally a headlamp mounted device tethered to a fiber optic cable. Well, you can get rid of the fiber optic system, the illuminator, the high intensity discharge sources, and go to LED where it’s more of a headmounted unit, you’re free to roam around.

So I think the advancement is not only the size of device but the smaller scale of the system., Integration of controls, particularly infrared touch technology, with the semiconductor nature of LEDs, together let you create more adaptive environments that you didn’t have available before.

Rodney Bailey : I think we’re taking light boldly “where light has never gone before,” to use the Star Trek analogy.

Electronic Products : I guess I’m still kind of amazed at what’s going on: watching what buildings are doing as far as signage goes, with the building itself becoming the sign. The Olympics is another case in point, showing us things that could be done that we haven’t seen before.

But I guess we’re going to say, “Okay, you did that, what else is new? What else can you do that’s different?” There don’t seem to be any boundaries to where we can take lighting these days, and I guess that’s going to continue. We’re just going to find new and new applications every day for this technology.

Part of the impetus for LED technology is greening. We’ve referred to energy efficiency a lot today. By green I don’t only mean energy efficiency; I’m referring also to the idea of recycling and to the materials used and how they have to be handled.

What are your views on the green aspects of lighting?

Donato Montanari : I think that the first thing that comes to mind is mercury and lack thereof in LEDs. So LEDs are much inherently “greener”.

Whether or not that really has an impact on the environment is not clear, but in a sense that’s beyond the point. If you have an LED in the fixture you provide, then you can write on the box “Mercury Free” and I think that this is getting a lot of attention, both from the consumers and the system integrators. And this is something that you can really sell.

It is really marketing driven and makes people more aware of the LEDs out there. Whereas it’s very difficult to explain efficiency, or the lumens per watt, or color temperatures to the end user, when they look at the box and it says “Mercury Free”, they know mercury is not a good thing for their body and they’ll buy the box with the LED inside.

Marc Dyble : Disposal definitely is a big issue. Commercial users understand fluorescents and the need for recycling to extract mercury, but residential users, consumers, up until recently, did not have a way of recycling compact fluorescents or it was difficult to do so.

Because LEDs last longer, the need to dispose of them is reduced. Thus their is less impact on recycling programs and landfills with LED sources, as well as, obviously, energy savings and reduction of carbon emissions. That sort of thing is advantageous.

Electronic Products : Are all the materials being used in the LED systems, do they all meet say the European standards for recycling?

Rodney Bailey : So far. But new California guidelines, and maybe somebody can expand on that, are now looking at the amount of arsenic inside of a red and amber LEDs and saying that they may want to consider that they may not be disposable just by throwing in a landfill.

Electronic Products : That doesn’t affect things like white, blue, green.

Rodney Bailey : Not so far. No arsenic there.

Donato Montanari : That’s actually correct and I think in Europe it’s becoming an issue because arsenic obviously is not particularly good for cancer.

Electronic Products : So that means you have to go to another color and use filtering in order to provide a very environmental compatible device. I suppose it’s possible to work around it as long as it’s only in one part of the spectrum.

There’s no question as far as the efficiency of the device itself about, as you said, as you said the carbon footprint there for LED devices is much lower than other, than incandescents certainly and comparable to CFL, correct?

Donato Montanari : Yes.

Electronic Products : I want to ask each of you to bring up any topics that you thought needed to be discussed in greater depth.

Peter Resca : I think we’ve touched on a lot of important aspects today. I think certainly one of the common themes we heard was application dependency and also needs for standards. I do think the Energy Star application and criteria for luminaires goes a long way towards starting to address the end product in developing a pull from the market that forces all of us to make sure that we’re on board and meeting the requirements to get a level playing field.

And I think that, as it emerges, the lighting industry and the solid state lighting market will continue to amaze us if not surprise us in the range of things we’re able to do.

Kee Yean Ng : I think we are in for an exciting time. But, just to balance the discussion, there are a lot of applications that do not need standards, actually. In looking at some applications, like the use of LEDs in displays, the use of LEDs is well established; they have been used in those markets for 20 to 30 years or even more. So just to balance the discussion, there are already many applications using LEDs, without any problem.

Paul Scheidt : Like Kee said, this is an exciting time and we’re going to see a lot of adoption. I know at least from Cree’s perspective, we’ve been seeing in massive growth, really massive growth in the number of LEDs being used in general illumination applications.

And I think it’s going to take some people by surprise just how quickly the products are going to be showing up in the marketplace. In addition to the improved quality not only of the LEDs that we’ve been providing but the improved quality of the luminaire designs that are out there, you add in a lot of these macro effects like the importance of energy efficiencies, the green laws getting rid of incandescent fixtures, people’s concerns about mercury in the fluorescent light sources, rebates from utility companies to adopt LED lighting — all these things are going to accelerate the demand for LED products beyond what already is at an astonishing level.

The key message I’d like to point out is that the LED lighting business case works now; we’re not talking about stuff that’s going to be working in a year or two. There are products out there like the Cree LR6 can light which are 40% more efficient than a CFL-based can light. So we’re already at the point where we can deliver high quality, high performance LED lighting products out there on the marketplace.

We say the future is now, that the lighting revolution is way past starting; we’re in the midst of it and it’s just going to keep going.

Brian Moody : Just to reiterate, we’re in an exciting time here and there’s been great strides in terms of efficacy with the LEDs. The challenges now shift to system level issues relating to managing the color quality, color stability over time, and thermal management for luminaires. Programmability within the luminaire provides a viable option for manufacturers who want to create high quality white light products. Collaborative problem-solving across vendors to solve the system level issues is needed increase the adoption of LED-based luminaires. I think this is an exciting time for the whole industry and I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

Donato Montanari : If you look at how new technologies get adoption in the market, the early adopters seed the new technology and make it real but it’s then up to the ‘creativity’ of the latter adopters to find this new technologies many homes. Creativity happens when people realize they have a new technology and with that technology they can do things that they couldn’t do before.

I think that’s where we are today with LED’s. One could argue that, with the technology we have today, we could create a system so that when a consumer goes back home after a day at work and walks into his house, a system of sensors detects his bios, maps those into an interpretation of his current mood, and changes the color of the lighting in the house accordingly.

Or you could envision an industrial building lit by LED’s and an intelligent system driving them, in such a way that the system could predict when a specific LED is going to break and could inform the building maintenance before the LED breaks. So really this is all about engineers and marketing people really sitting down and be creative.

Alexei Erchak : Hopefully after all the enthusiasm about LEDs this won’t sound too pessimistic and realistic, but I think it’s going to take time. I think there are lots of exciting opportunities out there and the key for companies focused on solid-state illumination is to really find those opportunities. So I actually think there’s more out there than has even been discovered to date.

And I know that’s certainly things that [our company is] focused on and I think that’s where a lot of the near term value will happen. I think that things will kind of go a little bit slower than hoped for industry-wide, but I do think it will happen, that we all agree that LEDs will happen, it’s just a matter of getting from the here to there. So there’s huge opportunities. We just need to make sure that we go out there and find them.

And also, one comment about the gap that we talked about. I think that’s really a manifestation of the value proposition of LEDs. I think if the value proposition is there that gap closes extremely fast and there are a lot of smart, sophisticated people out there and I think that, if there’s a clear value proposition for LEDs and sophisticated customers they will close that gap.So I think there’s probably a direct correlation between the two and we talked earlier,

I didn’t get to chime in about what are the big surprises, or where have you been surprised by the LED industry. I been surprised that this gap discussion is still on the table. I heard it when Luminous first entered the LED industry in 2002 when our company started and the exact same discussion is happening today, so I’ve been surprised by that.

Rodney Bailey : I think all of us are in the right place at the right time. This has got to be the biggest and fastest growing market in the world. The applications are abounding, more people are getting into it. It’s not only being mandated by countries but it’s also being enticed by the energy companies to do more with it.

I think the standards are going to be hard things to do because the changes are so rapid, the fixtures are so different and the applications are so various that standards are going to be hard to come up with.

One of the negative things on the supplier side is that obsolescence of some of the inventory is growing in respect because there’s so many new and better VLEDs that are coming out so quickly that you almost can’t keep up and people do not want to buy the old stuff. They only want to buy the better binned part, the higher intensity part.

I think one area that we didn’t touch on at all is the effect LEDs can have on countries like Africa, where no electric grid exists. We match up the VLEDs with solar cells, and that’s going to have a huge impact in places like Africa.

Electronic Products : Yes, it’s less demanding in terms of what kind of power is needed for these devices and therefore again it can go in countries who don’t have widespread power grids, so that they could use these in places where they didn’t have lighting before.

Rodney Bailey : Or we’re finding out it’s a lot cheaper than the coal oil used for lighitng.

Marc Dyble : As we all know, this market has enormous growth potential and is moving rapidly in that direction. Still there is a lack of knowledge transfer in the industry from the manufacturer side through the end user. So really the key is providing educational resources for both the luminaire integrators, such as our LED Light For You , but also through reaching out to the end user and showing the benefits of the technology, what some of the pitfalls are, and how to get around those. These things are critical to LED adoption.

Electronic Products : Very good points, gentlemen. I agree that the industry is ready to provide what’s needed in the marketplace. What impact the general market fluctuations are going to have on advancement I don’t know, but I think that the technology is there and the solutions are there. We do have work to do, but I think we can start today doing practical things with this technology, new and exciting things that we haven’t done before. ■