Due to COVID-19 pandemic, countless international events across the world have been cancelled or postponed in the past few month. However, in China, where the outbreak first began, LASER World of PHOTONICS will be held as planned in July. (Image:  LASER World of PHOTONICS CHINA) Chinese government issued the guidelines of preventing and controlling the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) on May 8, 2020 and the emergency response level of major public health emergencies in Shanghai was adjusted to level 3 afterwards. Following the gra...

General Electric (GE) is exiting its century-old lighting business with its announcement on May 27, 2020 that it has signed a definite agreement to sell the lighting unit to Savant System. Financial details of the deal was not revealed by both parties. Based on the agreement, Savant System will continue use the GE brand and keep headquarter in Cleveland, Ohio. The transaction is expected to close by mid-2020 and more than 700 employees will transfer to Savant after the deal completed. GE’s light bulb business has a history of almost 130 years and it was the f...

Micro LED and Mini LED technology bring new hopes for industry players in the field since they have been suffered from price competition with oversupply. Taiwanese LED companies were the first to begin Micro LED and Mini LED development and they have entered mass production phase for Mini LED in the past two years. In 2020, as Apple is rumored to release Mini LED-based products, it is expected that demands for Mini LED display technology will surge. Seeing the trend, LED and display companies in China are also pushing their technology development aim...

BIOS Lighting and TrueLight announced their new strategic partnership to advance circadian lighting applications and bring the health benefits of natural sunlight indoors. The new dimmable TrueLight Circadia bulb uses patented BIOS SkyBlue Technology to pinpoint key photoreceptors that signal circadian responses. During the daytime, the TrueLight Circadia bulb infuses the critical sky-blue region (near 490nm), which helps improve alertness, mood and performance. Dimming the bulb after the sun goes down removes daytime photoreceptors and sends nighttime signals to he...

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred the awareness of disinfection and stimulated demands for related applications based on UVC radiation. UVC LED products have thus become a hit across the world. However, the safety issue of UV light also become a concern as direct exposure of UV radiation is harmful for people and animal. Aim to improve safety of UV disinfection and expand application opportunities, researcher across the world are searching for method to make UV light less harmful. And far-UVC seems to be the solution. A new research carried out by the Univers...

Seoul Viosys and SETi have reported a wide range of applications with its Violeds technology, which was claimed to achieve 99.9% sterilization of coronavirus. After the collaboration with automotive component supplier and home appliance makers to apply the technology for car interior disinfection and laundry tank cleaning, the two company announced the launch of portable air purifier with Violeds under the brand “VAC.” SETi and Seoul Viosys are going to release Violeds technology adopted portable air purifiers to reduce the risk of infection from different pat...

Last week, Samsung announced that it is supporting five startups created by Samsung employees under the C-Lab Inside in-house incubation program. One of the new startups, SunnyFive, builds a window look lighting device delivering artificial sunlight. (Image: Samsung) According to Samsung, the window-shaped lighting created by SunnyFive produces full spectrum of light which is similar to natural light, simulating lighting situation including dawn, sunrise, sunset and dusk. Samsung also highlighted that this window-like lighting device can help users synthesize vitamin D...

LED chip supplier Epistar said that it is seeing surging demands for Mini LED display and fine-pitch display. With its mature miniaturized LED technology, the company is expecting to ship about 689.2 billion units of LED chip in 2020. Epistar is reportedly supplying Apple for the coming Mini LED-based iPad Pro and MacBook. The Taiwan-based chip maker has increased its investment for capacity expansion and turned 95% of its blue LED capacity in Taiwan into Mini LED production to meet the demands of Apple products. Despite that Epistar has already pro...

Signify announced the appointment of Francisco Javier van Engelen Sousa as Chief Financial Officer (CFO), succeeding René van Schooten, who currently holds the position on an interim basis. The appointment will become effective on June 15, 2020. Javier most recently held the position of CFO for Grupo Telepizza, a food operator, ultimately leading the process to take the company private in 2019. Signify will propose the appointment of Javier van Engelen to the Board of Management at an Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders (EGM), to be h...

German research institute the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut (FBH) and Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) have developed UV LEDs emitting UV light that is safe to the skin. The achievement has yet commercially available but will be tested in medicine research centers in Germany. The FBH and TUB worked under the framework of their Joint Lab GaN Optoelectronics and created LEDs that deliver far UV light at wavelengths around 230 nm and provide more than 1 mW output power. According to the FBH, the light does not penetrate into the living layers of...

As many countries and cities are lifting the COVID-19 restrictions and reopening business, how to continuously prevent the spread of the virus is a critical challenge for all. LEDinside noticed that many sensor technology developers have created solutions to anonymously monitoring people’s activities in public for controlling social distance and checking health status. LiDAR technology, for example, is now used to support people flow management. Hitachi Vantara, the digital infrastructure and solutions subsidiary of Hitachi, is leveraging its technology to deliver a ...

The British government announced the new tariff regime as it is exiting the EU. The UK Global Tariff (UKGT) was introduced last week to replace the EU’s Common External Tariff on January 1, 2021. With UKGT, LED lamps will be free from tariffs as the new regime aims to support sustainable economy. (Image: Pixabay) According to the UK government, the UKGT is tailored to the needs of the UK economy and will simply nearly 6000 tariff lines to reduce administrative cost. In order to back green economy, tariffs on over 100 items related renewable ...

Signify announced that its lighting portfolio will meet the new EU Ecodesign and Energy labeling regulations, which will affect all lighting products in the EU Member States from September 2021 onwards. The new regulations are representative of the enormous transition that has taken place in the lighting industry. (Image: Signify) The new Ecodesign regulation combines the current three EU regulations on lighting into one. It introduces stricter energy efficiency requirements. Together with the new regulation on Energy Labeling it means that the energy labels for al...

Rumors of Apple’s smart glasses products have never stopped but now they are even more materialized. Jon Prosser, host of Front Page Tech, unveiled alleged details about the AR glasses that Apple might reveal. It was said that Apple will call its AR glasses “Apple Glass,” which will pair with an iPhone like Apple Watch. There will be displays for both lenses and LiDAR sensors will be adopted to enable gesture interaction. In addition, the glasses will be wireless charged. (Image: screenshot from the video of Front Page Tech) Prosser cl...

Researchers at the University of Tokyo published a research demonstrating their achievement of the highest mobility among thin films of tin dioxide. This high mobility could allow engineers to create thin and even transparent tin dioxide semiconductors for use in next-generation LED lights, photovoltaic solar panels or touch-sensitive display technologies. Tin dioxide can be made into a semiconductor. A research team from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tokyo demonstrated the highest mobility in a thin film of tin oxide ever achieved. The improved mobility no...

Display solution provider Planar introduce its new LED display product series featuring fine pixel pitch and high brightness to support a wide range of application environments. (Image: Planar) The Planar FX Series offers outdoor models available in 1.5, 1.9, 2.6, 2.9 and 3.9 mm pixel pitches, in addition to indoor models with 1.5, 1.9 and 2.6 mm pixel pitches. The outdoor products support up to 4000 nits brightness and indoors 3500 nits. “As customer demand and confidence in LED video walls has grown, our customers have naturally envisioned use cases requirin...

Korea’s LiDAR sensor startup company, SOS LAB, announced that it has secured series A+ investment of a total of US$8 million starting from a lead investment from Korea Development Bank (KDB), bringing the company’s total capital raised so far to US$ 14 million. Despite a decline in general economic activities due to COVID-19, SOS LAB successfully attracted the investment and it has now unveiled its plans for the commercialization of LiDAR. (Image: SOS LAB) SOS LAB disclosed ML-1, the product which mounted the aforemention...

LG announced that it will move two of the six production lines in the Gumi factory in South Korea to its Indonesia facility in Cibitung in order to increase efficiency and capacity for TV production. LG said it is expanding the TV business with the aim to “diversify its production footprint and step up capacity,” and moving TV production lines from South Korea to Indonesia is one of the strategies. The Korean company plans to turn its Cibitung facility in Indonesia into a new regional hub and expects the transformation to boost the efficiency of LG&rsqu...

People are getting more aware of how natural lighting affects the body as well as the psychological feelings. Lighting design and LED technology also address how the artificial light source can mimic the light in the nature. But how do we measure the “naturalness” of light? Bridgelux introduced a new metric to quantify the naturalness. Bridgelux announced that it has developed a new metric to enable objective comparison of light sources to natural light, since standard lighting quality metrics such as CRI and TM-30 do not fully address the naturalness. The LED...

Apple has sparked considerable discussions in the market after rumors surfaced that the company’s new 12.9-inch iPad Pro, to be released in 2021, may be equipped with Mini LED backlight technology. According to the newest investigations by the LEDinside research division of TrendForce, the manufacturing cost of Mini LED backlight displays is currently higher than that of traditional LCD and OLED displays. However, as manufacturers continue to make improvements in process technology and yield rate, the cost of Mini LED backlight displays is expected to under...

Some LEDs made from perovskite emit light over a broad wavelength range. To further explain the feature, scientists from the University of Groningen inspected some cases and proposed new explanation which may help other scientists to design perovskite LEDs capable of broad-range light emission. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications on May 11, 2020. Low-dimensional (2D or 1D) perovskites emit light in a narrow spectral range and are therefore used to make LED of superior color purity. However, in some cases, a broad emission spectrum at energy le...

Fluence by OSRAM announced its partnership with Compassionate Cultivation, a medical cannabis provider in Texas, USA. The two companies will collaborate on research studies using Fluence’s LED lighting systems to gather new insights into sustainable cannabis production. Compassionate Cultivation aims to ensure secure supply of high quality medical cannabis and teams up with Fluence to explore potential lighting strategies for optimizing cannabis growth. (Image: Fluence by Osram) Together, Fluence and Compassionate Cultivation will produce and publish...

Apple was reported last week that it has planned to invest US$334 million for the new facility in Taiwan, located in the Longtan section of Hsinchu Science Park. The new factory is believed to focus on Micro LED and Mini LED technologies which Apple aims to apply in its new products. Taiwanese companies Epistar and AUO as well as other companies of the Mini LED and Micro LED supplier chains are reportedly supporting Apple’s products adopting the next-gen display technologies. Apart from getting closer with its partners, another major reason for Ap...

Massive waves are crashing in the “Times Square” of Seoul, on the immense LED video wall wrapping around the SMTown Coex Artium building in South Korea. The huge wave content is created by d’strict, a digital technology company based in South Korea, bringing a vivid wave image into the Seoul city center. (Image: Screenshot from d'strict video clip) The curved LED screen measures 80.0 meter in width and 20.1 meters in height, which is four times the size of a basketball court in Seoul, according to a report covered by The Korea Herald. S...

The COVID-19 outbreak has spurred people’s awareness in disinfection and roused demands for related products and applications. UVC LEDs with germicidal function thus become popular among consumers and brands of home appliance. LG Electronics launched a new refrigerator with ice and water purifier using UVC LED technology. A UVC LED is equipped at the outlet of the water purifier of the refrigerator and is able to diminish 99.99% E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus based on the Korea Construction & Living Environment Research Institute (KCL) t...

Seoul Semiconductor has filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey against an automotive component distributer Onyx Enterprise International. According to Seoul Semiconductor, Onyx distributes various automotive LED lights on its online platform “CARiD.com,” which offers car parts and accessories covering automotive headlamps, tail lights and fog lights. The Korean company claimed that automotive LED products being sold on “CARiD.com” infringe 12 patents – including...

Signify launched its new lighting product based on the concept of Human Centric Lighting, NatureConnect, which is built on proven biophilic design principles, usint elements of nature in interior spaces to create healthy, engaging and inspiring environments.   (Image: Signify) It is suggested from several researches that exposure to the right amount of light during the day, as well as the colors and dynamics from nature helps to improve people’s physical and psychological wellbeing. But the modern life style often leads to lack access to enough daylight, resulting...

LG is joining the business of LED cinema screen to compete against its rival Samsung, reported by Aju News, a Korea-based media. It was reported in April that LG has registered a trademark for LG LED Cinema on March 31, 2020, to prepare for related business. Under the trademark, LEG plans to release LED signage for theaters. LG reported planned to release its cinema LED products at CinemaCon 2020 in Las Vegas, USA, but the event has been cancelled due to COVID-19. Nevertheless, as a proactively player in the display industry, LG has already i...

Canadian LiDAR technology developer LeddarTech has been working with its investor Osram on the LiDAR platform “PERCEPT.” Osram said that it is developing the first flexible solid state LiDAR focusing on mid to long range sensing and targeting the automotive mass market. (Image: Osram) The PERCEPT LiDAR will comprise Osram’s laser emitters and LeddarTech’s processing software. With these featured components, Osram aims to develop a LiDAR with the measuring approach of ToF. The LiDAR platform will serve long- a...

Researchers at the lab of Tobias Kippenberg at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne found a new way to implement a parallel FMCW LiDAR engine by using integrated nonlinear photonic circuitry. They coupled a single FMCW laser into a silicon-nitride planar microresonator, where the continuous wave laser light is converted into a stable optical pulse train due to the double balance of dispersion, nonlinearity, cavity pumping and loss. The study has been published in Nature. Coherent laser ranging, also known as frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) LiDA...