Connected lighting system integrating smart control and tunable light opens a room for health care applications. Hospitals in Berlin, Germany and Barcelona, Spain, showed the benefits of implementing connected LED lighting systems. At Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron hospital, a human centric lighting system which can tune the lighting spectrum to match natural daylight was installed in the intensive care unit. With seven LED engines and the combination of single-peak LEDs phosphor-converted LEDs, the system enables light emission to match the visible range spa...

Soon after Osram’s announcement of the bidding offer from Bain Capital and the Carlyle Group, the German company said that it will support the public takeover offer. On July 4th, Osram announced that its Managing Board and Supervisory Board decided to support the legally binding transaction offer for the public takeover of all the shares of Osram by Bain Capital and the Carlyle Group. Osram and the consortium have also concluded an investor agreement that includes comprehensive commitments. “Bain and Carlyle are the right partners for Osram at the rig...

Osram announced a confirmation of receiving a binding offer from Bain Capital and The Carlyle Group, the US-based private equity firms who have been in talk with the German company for a buyout since the end of 2018. According to Osram, the inventors have offered an amount of EUR 35 (US$39.5) per share for the buyout, which will be approximately 3.4 billion euro ($3.8 billion) for concluding the investor agreement and to make a public takeover offer. Osram said, “The responsible decision bodies will discuss and decide on this offer shortly.” Osram has b...

LEDinside, a division of TrendForce, holds the annual pivotal conference, Micro LEDforum 2019: Key Technology and Application Market, yesterday (July 2nd) at the National Taiwan University Hospital International Convention Center. Invited were Rohinni, TORAY, Konica Minolta, PARC, Plessey, Kyung Hee University, Macroblock, Ultra Display, the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and other leading manufacturers and experts at home and abroad to give penetrating analyses into the breakthroughs, applications and business opportunities o...

China’s biggest LED chip maker Sanan Optoelectronics was removed from the red-flag list of “unverified” entities by the U.S. last week along with other seven Chinese companies. On April 10th, 2019, the U.S. Commerce Department added 37 Chinese companies and research organizations including Sanan Optoelectronics to a red-flag list of “unverified” entities and warned that companies in the U.S. should be caution when dealing with the listed organizations. After the list came to effect, semiconductor equipment supplier Applied Materials h...

Congratulations Macroblock on 20th anniversary! Our 20th anniversary is an opportunity to honor to celebrate and look ahead to what's next. We celebrated our 20th anniversary with a grand event addressing the future of micro-LED technology development and highlighting its contribution as a key to the next five years. This event is held on 27th of June at Shangri-La's Far Eastern Plaza Hotel in Taipei and offering full-day sessions. "In honor of celebrating Macroblock 20th anniversary, we hold this forum for ‘Next Five Years of LED Display Techn...

Micro LED technology is on its way of business transforming! Since last year, we have seen different Micro LED display products in various trade shows from worldwide companies. Although Micro LED technology is still fraught with myriad challenges, it has become much more developed than it was two years ago. Schedules for the commercialization of Micro LEDs will unfold as the technology matures, predicted to bring Micro LED market revenue up to US$4.2 billion by 2023. This year, LEDinside Micro LEDforum 2019 has invited professionals across the world to sha...

Osram moved a step forwards to its transformation to a high-tech company by selling its Siteco luminaires business to Stern Steward Capital, the investment arm of Stern Steward & Co. based in Munich. According to Osram, “Separation from Osram gives Siteco entrepreneurial freedom,” and Stern Stewart Capital will continue the current transformation approach. Despite that the financial details of the transaction were not revealed by both parties, Osram noted that its cost situation would also be improved with the elimination of previous Group structures. ...

Continental, the German automotive manufacturing company, announced its collaboration with Leia, a Silicon Velley company for developing light-field automotive displays to show 3D information around vehicles. Through the partnership, Continental aims to develop a new light-field cockpit solution, the Natural 3D Lightfield Instrument Cluster, which, according to the company, is an evolutionary step in the design of the human-machine interaction within automotive vehicles. (Image: Continental) According to Continental and Leia, the concept of the new light-field solu...

Taiwan-based LED chip maker Epistar held its annual shareholder meeting on June 19, 2019. The company expects that Mini LED products will be the major driving momentum in 2019. Epistar continues to work on high margin LED products including UV LED, VCSEL, Mini LED and Micro LED. The company is working intensively with Mini LED projects and its products have been adopted in the end applications including monitors, notebooks and tablets. Epistar foresees an increase of product shipment with rising demands in the market 2020, which will push the produ...

Samsung is increasing visibility worldwide with its display technology. The Korean giant has completed a massive LED displays installation at One Time Squire building in New York City and announced expansion of its Onyx Cinema LED adoption in Texas, USA. (Image: Samsung) Samsung’s new displays at One Times Square take up the entire front facing panel which together measured more than 1,081 square meters (11,639 square feet). The displays feature premium center-stage exposure with full motion video, live-streaming and interactive capabilities. The inst...

A research team from Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University developed a novel spray synthesis technique to fabricate multi-color Perovskite quantum dots with excellent emission properties which can enhance Micro LED display production. The research was published in Advanced Materials in 2017. (Image: Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan) Perovskite quantum dots (PQDs) are one of the most exciting research topics recently because of their excellent photophysical properties and low cost fabrication. However, the PQDs which were synthesized by inje...

After lots of talking about visible lighting communication, or LiFi (Light Fidelity), Signify announced the launch of Trulifi, a new range of LiFi systems. The world’s largest lighting company also reported two new customers of the systems. According to Signify, the LiFi systems, branded Trulifi, leverage existing and future professional luminaires for fast and reliable data transmission. Trulifi uses optical wireless transceiver technology built, or retrofitted, into Philips luminaires. Customers can use their current lighting infrastructure to power wireless conn...

Luminaires manufacturers and LED power suppliers in the UK and US companies are merging to speed up LED lighting applications and overcome difficulties in the industry. ERP Power, a portfolio company of Angeles Equity Partners who provide connected LED drivers for the lighting industry, announced the acquisition of Lumenetix. Lumenetix had developed tunable color light engines and digital controls designed to deliver interactive lighting experiences. With the acquisition, ERP aims to combine its power control and Lumenetix’ tunable light to reduce origina...

China LED company Shineon presented its Micro LED display at GILE 2019 with its new brand “IconiView” targeting high-end display products. The 139-inch 4K Micro LED display was developed by Shineon and Lumens, using Flip-Chip-on-Module (COM) technology with a pixel density of 1,570,900 pixel/m2. The display achieved a contrast ratio of 3000:1 and its brightness is over 2000nit. According to Shineon, the product has been verified and can be mass produced. Shineon said it has been developing laser-lift-off thin-film LED technology which i...

Micro LED and Mini LED products are going to be the spot lights at this year’s Touch Taiwan, the Taiwan-based display show which will take place in Taipei, Taiwan during August 28 to 30. Micro LED is regarded the next generation display technology with its excellent performance including high brightness, high contrast, low power consumption and long lifetime which suppress OLED. Despite that several manufacturing barriers have slow down the commercialization process of Micro LED, worldwide technology developers have teamed up to leverage their expertise in...

Horticultural applications of LED lighting are the current trend in the lighting industry. Leading companies around the world have been developing different products to meet the increasing demands. As worldwide need for healthy, fresh food continues to grow, greenhouse growers require efficient, effective lighting to enable year-round growing. Current, powered by GE announced the release of the Arize Element Top Light, the industry’s first one-for-one LED replacement for 1000W High Pressure Sodium (HPS) products. The Arize Element features multiple light...

Using LED as a light source, researchers at Osaka University have now developed a convenient light-driven process for oxidizing polypropylene (PP) without harmful waste. The research team used radicals to make the plastic react. Scholars chose an LED lamp as the light source photo-chemically activate radicals for breaking down the chemical bonds which make plastic unreactive and hard to decompose. "In applications like printing and medical materials, plastics must be surface-modified," explained Tsuyoshi Inoue, co-author of the study. "Oxidizing C-H bo...

Cree announced an update to its financial guidance for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019. The company modified its revenue forecast of fiscal 4Q19 to the range of US$245 million to 252 million from prior US$263 million to 271 million as the U.S. government put Huawei on a trade blacklist. Cree said the update of financial guidance is in response to the decision on May 15, 2019, by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) of the U.S. Department of Commerce to add Huawei Technologies and 68 of its affiliates to the “Entity List” maintained by the U.S...

Fohse, a horticulture lighting supplier based in Nevada, USA, announced that it has closed a deal with Curative Cannabis, a Canadian cannabis grower, to supply cannabis grow lights to its growing facility in Ontario. Curative Cannabis has a production capacity that is scheduled to produce up to 3,000 kg (approx. 6,600 lbs) of cannabis per year both for large-scale cultivation. With the supply partnership, Fohse will be deploying its A3i and F1V LED lighting models in Curative Cannabis' 30,000 square foot growing facility. Curative Cannabis expects that its yield...

Plessey, the UK-based semiconductor technology provider, has successfully developed GaN-on-Si monolithic Micro LED. According to the company, the innovative development will support next generation applications such as AR headsets, head-up displays (HUD) and other smart wearables to enter the mass market. Given their high contrast, high speed, wide viewing angle, high brightness and more efficient and longer-lasting operation, Micro LEDs are perfect for display applications on wearables such as smart watches, HUDs and AR headsets. (Image: Plessey) Howeve...

In the manufacturing process of Micro LED display, inspection and repair technologies are indispensable to enhance and assure production yield. But again, given the massive amount of Micro LED chips in tiny size, Micro LED display makers face a great challenge for the testing and repairing process. LED testing includes photoluminescence (PL) and electroluminescence (EL) test, the former method can test LED chips without touching and ruining them but it might not detect all the defects compared to EL test. On the contrary, EL test is able to identify more defec...

Rumors about Apple said that the company will launch Mini LED products in the second half of 2019. Nevertheless, at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference 2019, Mini LED products have not showed up. Instead, Apple presented a 32-inch HDR display, Pro Display XDR which adopts direct LED backlight. (Image: Apple) Pro Display XDR is a 32-inch 6K LCD monitor featuring a resolution of 6,016*3,384, 1,600 nits peak and 1,000 nits sustained brightness and a contract rate of 1,000,000:1. These characteristics were achieved by using a direct ...

An emerging landscape bereft of standards, some have defined Micro LEDs as anything where the LED semiconductor die is smaller than 70 μm down to perhaps 1μm. Larger die are typically called Mini LEDs, used in applications such as local dimming. The semiconductor die are essentially a miniature version of the die in the well-known, commoditized solid-state lighting (SSL LED) industry. Besides physical dimensions, there are some subtle differences between the SSL industry and the display industry. Spectral tuning notwithstanding, the end goal for SSL industry...

LiDAR sensors not only improve road safety for self-driving cars, they can also help in monitoring and care of elderly. IBM began a trial home care service adopting LiDAR sensors with a UK startup company Cera Care. The pilot project will combine IBM’s machine learning software with LiDAR sensors, reported Reuters. IBM Research UK teamed up with Cera Care to develop an elderly home care system to monitor clients’ activity. They will install LiDAR sensors in the houses of 10 to 15 volunteers in the UK since June to track activities of t...

On May 27, 2019, the authorization conference for COMMON Cathode IC of Guangzhou SiliconCore (SiliconCore) was held at Hilton Hotel in Guangzhou. LEDinside, the LED industry research division of TrendForce was honored to have the chance to interview Mr. Eric Li, the President and CEO of Guangzhou SiliconCore on-site. During the conference, Guangzhou SiliconCore demonstrated the latest products of LED display driver IC based on Common Cathode Technology, including SCL8080 series and SCL8081 series. Combined with the control chip develope...

In order to commercialized Micro LED display, the current goal of Micro LED technology developers is to reduce production cost and improve yield through optimizing manufacture process. One obstruction to the goal comes from the production process of mass transferring and bonding, as assembling million Micro LED chips to targeted substrates poses a great challenge for display makers. Micro LED display is made from Micro LED array consisting of a massive amount of Micro LED chips, forming individual pixels. Since the size of Micro LED chips is less than 100 &m...

Mojo Vision, a California-based startup focusing on invisible computing, revealed it Micro LED display featuring 14,000 PPI, which the company claimed to be the smallest and densest dynamic display ever made. The display sized only 0.48mm, same as a grain of sand but it can deliver a pixel density 300 times greater than current smartphone displays. The prototype technology uses Micro LEDs and is expected to be applied in wearable devices including AR/VR hardware and heads up displays (HUDs). (Image: Mojo Vision) According to Mojo Vision, the new monoc...

LED lighting could help to improve brain activity including memory and cognitive function, according to the research by a professor of bioengineering at The University of Texas at Arlington. Hanli Liu and Jacek Dmochowski, the assistant professor of bioengineering at City University of New York, are working on using a light-based technology to increase the energy available to brain cells and improve astronaut performance with an $800,000 NASA grant. Liu researches how to use lasers to deliver near-infrared light to the human brain to detect traumatic brain injurie...

glō, the Swedish-American Micro LED company, has been progressing its Micro LED technology since it exhibited the world’s brightest Micro LED display with JDC at Display Week 2018. In 2019, the company showcased four prototypes of Micro LED display including smartwatch display, AR display, HUD and a smartphone-sized panel with Kyocera during Display Week. (Image:glō) The solution of glō features two technology, RGB InGaN Micro LED and direct wafer transfer onto different substrate materials including silicon (CMOS), glass (LTO...