OPTEC International, a green technologies provider, announced that it has signed the exclusive North American distribution rights agreement for the "Pro-Sun" LED Horticultural Grow Lamps in a timely procedure as the U.S. Congress signs the Multi-Billion Dollar "Farm Bill". In December 2018, the U.S. Congress passed the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, so called “Farm Bill,” which legalized marijuana growth in the U.S. As LED lighting is wide used in the cultivation of cannabis LED, LED grow light demands is ...

Chinese LED maker Sanan Optoelectronics announced that the company has supplied Mini and Micro LED chips to several panel manufacturers in the products unveiled at CES 2019. Sanan noted that its LED chips have been adopted in TVs, digital displays, smartphones, smart watches, AR/VR glasses, and gaming notebooks. Mini LEDs, with its compact unit size between 100 to 200 micrometers, allow for high density backlight designs with local dimming capabilities. Sanan has begun large-scale production of RGB Mini LEDs and offers a family of RGB display and bac...

LiDAR startup AEye announced that it has extended strategic partnership with automotive lighting supplier HELLA and started collaboration with LG Electronics in developing and manufacturing sensing and perception solutions for autonomous driving. AEye’s iDAR artificial perception system leads the industry in range and scan rate performance for automotive-grade LiDAR. iDAR is a new form of intelligent data collection that fuses 1550 nanometer (nm), solid-state agile LiDAR with a low-light HD camera and embedded AI to intelligently capture data at the...

Hyundai MOBIS is showcasing the latest Communication Lighting concept at CES 2019. Communication Lighting uses an "Indicating Lighting Zone" to indicate when an autonomous vehicle is operating in self-driving mode. The concept also includes a "Communication Lighting Zone" that uses LED, digital boards, headlamp projection and sound to communicate with nearby pedestrians and vehicles during various driving scenarios. According to Hyundai MOBIS, autonomous vehicles outfitted with Communication Lighting can detect a pedestrian from more tha...

AIXTRON announced that it has signed a Joint Collaboration Agreement with PlayNitride to accelerate technical and commercial breakthroughs of Micro LED. AIXTRON’s AIX G5+ C MOCVD system will be adopted by PlayNitride for the manufacturing of GaN-based (gallium nitride) Micro LEDs. PlayNitride has presented Micro LED displays with high resolution and supplied its Micro LED chips to Samsung for the 75-inch Micro LED display demonstrated at CES 2019. By signing a joint collaboration agreement, AIXTRON and PlayNitride ...

ams announced its cooperation with Face++, a Chinese AI software developer, to accelerate OEMs’ and system integrators’ deployments of 3D optical sensing technologies such as face recognition. According to ams, the partnership with Face++ will enable manufacturers to bring facial recognition and other systems to market faster including functions like facial payments, Animoji creation and augmented/virtual reality. The 3D optical sensing solutions created by ams and Face++ use infrared light projectors to map the surface of real-world objects such as a user’...

ams, the Austria-based Apple supplier, has announced the release of its new sensing component which can measure ambient light from behind an OLED screen. The newly launched RGB light and IR proximity sensor IC, TCS3701, is featured with behind-screen light measuring ability. The capability supports today’s industrial design trend to maximize smartphone display area by eliminating front-facing bezels, where an ambient light/proximity sensor is typically located. With the new sensor, the next iPhone could be notch-free. (Image: ams) According to ams, it has...

Autonomous driving is one of the featured technologies at CES 2019. Automobile manufacturers, LiDAR developers as well as sensing components providers have all prepared to join the high profile event with their cutting-edge technologies. LEDinside has selected some noticeable exhibitors who are showcasing the next generation technology for autonomous driving applications. Velodyne Lidar Velodyne continues to present new products for CES 2019. Last week the company released that it will demonstrate Velodyne Alpha Puck™ and Velodyne Velarray™, sensors ma...

Vertically integrated LED company Lextar announced a revenue of NT$ 715 million (US$ 23.2 million) for December 2018 with a decrease of 13% MoM and 17% YoY. The company’s revenue of 2018 was NT$ 11 billion (US$ 357 million) with an on-year decrease of 8.2%. Lextar has drastically reduced its general lighting business in 2018 and focused on new opto-semiconductor technology development with the aim to boost its profit. The company has targeted four fields including displays, professional lighting, automotive applications and sensing technologies. Mini LED...

Razer, the gaming peripherals provider which is famous for its LED-encrusted keyboard, has step into the automotive business with its Chroma lighting integrated in cars through the partnership with Leap Motor, a Chinese electric car startup. On January 3rd, Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan announced on his Instagram that the company has teamed up with Leap Motor for adopting its Chroma lighting to automotive applications. He said, “Razer Chroma is the world's largest RGB platform and I'm excited to announce that Leapmotor, the hot electric car startup fro...

Plessey Semiconductors announced that it has worked with Nanoco Technologies, the UK-based cadmium-free quantum dot (CFQD) provider to shrink the pixel size of monolithic Micro LED displays. By combining Nanoco’s CFQD semiconductor nanoparticle technology and its existing monolithic process, Plessey will integrate the quantum dots into selected regions of blue LED wafers to add red and green light. The process could shrink the practical pixel size by 87 percent, from today’s 30µm to 4µm. The advance enables the production of smaller Micro...

LEDinside illustrated the global car sales situation in 2018 and explained how the US-China trade war has impacted the automobile market and indirectly influenced the automotive LED market in the past year. In the second part of the analysis, we will further discuss the application trends of automotive LED as well as the global industrial chain of automotive LED. Mainstream automotive LED application trends The automotive LEDs are adopted in various places in cars including interior and exterior lighting, dashboards and rear view mirrors. Headlights as the m...

As a niche application with high profit, automotive LED lighting has been under the spotlight of many LED manufacturers. With 2019 starting, LEDinside would like to share some insights of the market trend on automotive LED. Global vehicle sales slows down due to the US-China disputes In the first half of 2018, car sales had slowly grown as the global economy was relatively stable. However, as the extra tariffs imposed by the Trump government came to effect in July, the on-going US-China dispute has created uncertainty in the global market and affected the sales...

The South Korean government is planning to designate OLED equipment as the core technology of the country and restrict the export to prevent technology leaks, reported BusinessKorea, a South Korean media. The report mentioned that the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) of South Korea and display equipment companies have held a meeting on December 30th to discuss the designation of OLED equipment as national core technology. Once it becomes national core technology, the technology's export and business merger and acquisition (M&A) will hav...

Everlight reported that it will continue to guard it’s the rights of the company and its customers in response to Seoul Semiconductor’s victory announcement about the patent infringement lawsuit in Germany. In December, Seoul Semiconductor has reported that it won the lawsuit in Germany which was filed in March 2017. Seoul Semiconductor accused Mouser Electronic of distributing Everlight’s LED products that infringed a patent of Seoul Semiconductor. The German Court judged in favor of Seoul Semiconductor and ordered to recall the accused products...

Technology has realized many stories we learnt from sci-fi fictions and movies. A new technology like the “dermal regenerator” in Star Trek that heals wound with laser was developed by a research team from Arizona State University. Kaushal Rege, professor of Chemical Engineering at Arizona State University, and his team members has published a paper on Advanced Functional Materials which describes how they successfully repaired animal wounds with laser-activated silk and gold nanomaterials. The researchers embedded gold nanorods in a silk protein matrix as...

People around the world are getting ready to celebrate the coming New Year. In Taipei, Taiwan, the iconic Taipei 101 building has been a popular celebrating spot for locals and international visitors. This year, an animated LED light show will shine with the annual Taipei 101 New year's Eve fireworks. The light show will be displaying Taiwan’s attractions with nine themes, including geographical landscape and culture diversity, according to Taipei Financial Center Corp, the organizer and the skyscraper manager. (Image: Taipei 101) The LED light sh...

There have been ups and downs in the LED industry in 2018. New technologies have continued to evolve while many leading industry players have made critical decisions to cut off old business. LEDinside has selected some significant updates of the influential companies in the industry to wrap up the year. Philips Lighting becomes Signify As one of the most famous lighting brands in the world, Philips Lighting officially changed its name to Signify in 2018. The company announced the name change plan as a gesture to transform the company. It has started to use the new na...

The Christmas tree set up in Rockefeller Center in New York City is one of the most iconic holiday symbols for all. Each year in mid-November, a tree, usually a Norway spruce, would be erected on the Plaza following a public lighting ceremony in late November. The 2018 Christmas tree was lit up by more than 50,000 LED lights on November 28th and will keep shining until January 7th. This year, the 22 meters (72 feet) high tree was crowned with a new Swarovski Star which has 3 million crystals and 70 glass spikes. The LED backlights provide the star with a brightne...

Horticulture lighting applications have become a critical market for the LED industry. LED lighting enables researchers and growers to break the limitation of conventional farming regarding the weather and space. With the help of LED lighting, innovative horticultural researches and activities were reported from all around the world. Various cultivation methods were developed to grow crops in places that we would not consider possible in the past. With the end of the year approaching, let’s look back at how scientists and industry innovators have used LED lighting to...

A student team from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology applied a freeform optical engineering concept for automotive LED headlight and has won a prize in the 2018 Global Capstone Design Fair held in South Korea. The students’ prototype utilizes freeform optics which requires less working parts than current headlight models. By utilizing molded plastic instead of the current practice of metal reflector cones, the headlight could be easier and cheaper to manufacture. With non-sequential ray tracing, the students designed a 3-D freeform lightguide to direct the light...

2018 has been a tough year for panel producers due to the dropping panel price caused by oversupply. Chinese panel makers are still expanding their production capacities for LCD and OLED displays, putting pressures on other industry players. Samsung is closing its 8.5 generation production line in 2019 and shifting the focus to QD-OLED panels in response to the price competition. LG Display also plans to expand its OLED production capacities in China and Korea targeting large sized TV displays. It is estimated that by 2020, the OLED investment of LG Displ...

Apple was grated with several patents relating to smart fabric in the past week. One of them is a glove with integrated circuity and forces sensors that could connect to Apple device for monitoring blood pressure, respiration and heart rate, reported Patently Apple. (Image: The US Patent and Trademark Office) According to the patent, Apple embeds force sensing circuity into fabrics that could sense pressure and force on the fingers and/or palm area of the glove. The glove can transmit the information collected from the circuitry to other devices for further processing an...

Sweden-based Fagerhult announced on December 21 that it has signed an agreement to acquire iGuzzini, the Italian lighting group for EUR 385 million (US$ 439 million). According to Fagerhult, the price of EUR 385 million will be paid with 74 percent in cash and 26 percent in new Fagerhult shares. The transaction is expected to complete in the first quarter of 2019. With iGuzzini joining the Fagerhult Group will, the largest lighting company in the Nordic countries will increase its presence in Italy, Switzerland, Spain and North America. The combined compan...

Unilumin Group, a Chinese LED application supplier, has collaborated with Maverick AV Solutions for expanding the market penetration of LED fine pitch displays in Europe. Unilumin manufacturers LED products ranging from 0.9mm to 12mm pixel pitch. The company also operates in a variety of verticals including command and control rooms, broadcast studios, corporate atria, meeting spaces and digital signage. With the partnership with Maverick AV Solutions, Unilumin is going to increase its presence in the European market. The Maverick team will push the LED prod...

Macroblock, the LED driver IC supplier, announced that it has broken through the production bottleneck of Mini LED products and expects to begin volume manufacturing in 1Q19. According to Macroblock, its flip-chip Mini LED performs better in luminous efficacy, heat dissipation and light distribution uniformity compared to the conventional package method. The company said that it has solved the production difficulties of Mini LED products with a production yield rate of 99.99 percent. Macroblock’s driver IC was adopted by Samsung for its LED cinem...

Bowery Farming, an indoor autonomous farming startup from New York, has raised US$ 90 million in Series B funding from investors including GV (formerly Google Ventures). and CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi. The company began operating in February 2017 and has opened two vertical farming facilities near New York since then. Bowery Farming applies technologies including robotics, machine learning and predictive analytics to autonomously operate the growing conditions for the crops. Vegetables are grown with controlled environment with optimized LED lighting spectr...

Velodyne Lidar announced its collaboration with Nikon as the optical technology company invests US$ 25 million in Velodyne. The two companies have begun discussions for a multifaceted business alliance. The purpose of the strategic partnership is to combine Nikon’s optical and precision technologies with Velodyne’s sensor technology. According to Velodyne, the relationship aims to advance the timeline for manufacturing and mass production of LiDAR for the autonomous and advanced safety global market. The parties have begun investigating a wide-ranging business...

Having looked back at the industry updates of Micro LED technology, let’s keep on reviewing the technology breakthroughs of Micro LED in the past year. KAIST Team Develops Flexible Vertical Micro LED to Cure Hair loss Problem In January, a researcher team at KAIST announced the development of flexible vertical micro LEDs (f-VLEDs). These f-VLEDs achieved optical power density (30 mW/mm2) three times higher than that of lateral Micro LEDs and can be applied to optogenetics for controlling the behavior of neuron cells and brains with...

German company TRUMPF is going to acquire Philips Photonics, the VCSEL production units of Royal Philips, to expand its product portfolio for 3D sensing and data transmission applications. Back in November Philips Photonics announced a milestone of shipping one billion VCSELs and soon after that the company was said to have increased the capacity of VCSEL production in Ulm, Germany. And now it is selling 100 percent of the operation to TRUMPF. The two companies are planning to finish the operation transaction by the second quarter of 2019 and neith...