LED companies have been keeping low stocking due to the sluggish demand in the end markets in 2018 and impacts of the China-US trade war, according to LEDinside, a division of TrendForce. Looking ahead to 2019, the overall industry still has risks of oversupply, but demands for niche applications, including fine-pitch LED digital display, Mini LED backlight, UV-C LED, automotive lighting and high-efficiency lighting LED, have a positive outlook and may drive the market growth in the future. After the recent G20 summit, China and the U.S. have announced to ...

WaveOptics is a UK-based Augmented Reality (AR) wearable device designer and manufacturer with its diffractive waveguides technology. The company announced that it has raised US$26 million from existing shareholders and new investors. One of its new investor, Goertek, has also signed an exclusive waveguide production partnership with WaveOptics. Goertek designs and produces high-tech consumer electronics. With the partnership with WaveOpics, the two companies aim to mass produce Waveguides’s waveguides for AR wearable applications (Image: WaveOptics) W...

Osram announced that it is going to showcase its cutting-edge technologies in a wide range of applications including mobility, connectivity, safety and security, and well-being and health at CES 2019. Osram will present sensors for self-driving vehicles, as well as Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS), and biometric identification applications. With the introduction of two new infrared LEDs, Osram enable biometric applications such as iris scan, driver monitoring, as well as facial and gesture recognition in vehicles. (Image: Osram) As for light emitting ap...

Monitoring LED drivers and controlling lighting function have become critical with increasing applications of LED products. Lighting companies and system producers develop new solutions for meeting the needs of various operations. Tridonic launched a set of various software tools for optimizing production errors and EnOcean will display its wireless sensor and control system for LED lighting. Tridonic released companionSUITE, a dynamic set of various software tools for long-term process optimization. The software gathers information of LED drivers and provides lumi...

LED manufacturers reported revenue drop for November as the demands decrease in the off-peak season. AOT, the LED company under the Foxconn Group, has posted a revenue of NT$ 332 million (US$ 10.76 million) for November with a decrease of 10.4% MoM and 39.9% YoY. LED backlighting is the major business of the company which accounts for more than 90 percent of its revenue. Therefore, the dropped demands of TV backlight due to seasonality led to the decreased monthly revenue of AOT. (Image: AOT) AOT also began the development of Mini and Micro LE...

Seoul Semiconductor announced that it won a patent litigation against Everlight in Germany. The patent involved in this litigation relates to an LED package structure for thermal dissipation. Everlight purchased this patent from a U.S. company in 2017, and subsequently brought a patent lawsuit against Seoul in the Mannheim Court of Germany. In December 2018, the Mannheim Court ruled in favor of Seoul Semiconductor and ordered that Everlight to bear the statutory costs of the court proceeding. (Image: Seoul Semiconductor) “Seoul has invested approximat...

Signify announced that that its share repurchase program which aims to reduce the company’s capital has been completed. (Image: Signify) In July 2018, Signify announced the start of a share repurchase program to buy back up to EUR 230 million (US$ 261.41 million) of its shares to reduce the company’s capital. Since the program began, Signify has continued to repurchase the share of the company and update the progress weekly. In line with its timeframe, the program was completed on December 7th. During the period, the company has bought back 9.7 million share...

Samsung Electronics unveiled its latest Onyx screen at Capital Cinema in Beijing, China on December 7. The 14-meter Onyx Cinema LED screen is 3D ready and the largest cinema LED screen launched by Samsung. “Our new Onyx display reflects a momentous step for the industry, as we usher in the next generation of cinema around the globe,” said Seog-gi Kim, Executive Vice President of Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics. “We’re excited to partner with Capital Cinema to help showcase the new industry standard for picture qualit...

Toyoda Gosei has developed an air conditioner register with LED illumination for automotive application that uses wireless power transfer technology based on magnetic resonant coupling. (Image: Toyoda Gosei) With LED light, the new vent register improves the night visibility of the knob that adjusts the direction and strength of air flow. The adoption of wireless power transfer technology avoids problems caused by conventional wired power supply that the wire harness could break from repeated manipulations of the knob. In addition, a wireless system allows greater freedom...

Six municipalities of New York State have partnered with RealTerm Energy to for LED streetlights conversion. The municipalities of Great Neck, Newark, Nyack, Goshen, Florida and Piermont to replace their current HID (high intensity discharge) streetlights to LED lights. In 2018, Governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo announced Smart Street Lighting NY, the energy efficiency project of New York State which aims to install at least 500,000 LED streetlights in New York by 2025. Following the project, the streetlight conversion of the six munici...

Selectronic, a UK-based specialist, has partnered with Chinese LED packager Hongli Zhuihui with a US$ 75 million collaboration agreement. The two companies will work with Taiwanese company Epistar to boost LED automotive product development. Selectronic is a distributor of LEDs in Europe for Hongli. Through the partnership with Epistar, Hongli will buy Epistar’s patented automotive LED chips for the production of automotive LED lighting and the development of automotive LED products. The strategic agreement between the companies will run until O...

TSLC Corporation, a subsidiary of SemiLEDs, announced the launch of its UVC LED product lines which include high power and high density LED chips and chip packages for the growing market of sterilization. To improve the efficiency of UVC LED, TSLC’s new product series uses a high refractive index material which is UVC transmissible to increase the light extraction by about 35%. TSLC’s UVC series consists of LED packages of variable footprints and power consumption. The product lineup includes single, four- and ten -chip packages. TS...

A research team in Taiwan announced that its development of OLED lighting is ready for commercial production. According to the research leader, Dr. Jwo-Huei Jou at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in Taiwan, the team has developed OLED lighting that is similar to candle light which produces softer light source and does not cause harm to the human eye. (Image: ITRI) The OLED research team of NTHU worked with Electronic and Optoelectronic System Research Laboratories at ITRI and WiseChip Semiconductor in the development of low color t...

Chinese e-commerce company JD.com, has opened a plant factory adopting hydroponic technology provided by Mitsubishi Chemical to supply fresh food for its online and offline customers. Through the strategic collaboration with Mitsubishi Chemical, JD.com plans to increase its capability of food production in order to control and monitor the quality of its food products. The company aims to set up to 10 plant factories in China. The newly built facility locates in the Tongzhou District of Beijing and is expected to produce 300 tons of vegetable annually with its 11,040 square...

LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) has been one of the technology focuses in the past two years as it is a key technology for automotive vehicles and many other applications. According to “2018 Infrared Sensing Application Market Report” by LEDinside, the market value of LiDAR laser is expected to reach US$ 154 million in 2020. Worldwide LiDAR sensor producers and semiconductor firms have been pushing LiDAR development and extending applications through collaboration with other technology partners. Apart from self-driving technology, LiDAR ...

Marktech Optoelectronics, a U.S.-based optoelectronic components manufacturer, announced that it has launched a product collection for wearable applications. The company introduces standard and custom emitters and detectors, in both multi-wavelength and hybrid designs and in UV, visible, infrared, and SWIR ranges for hospital-grade flexible, stretchable and wearable devices. Marktech supports wearable devices including fitness trackers; cardiac, oxygen, and blood pressure monitors; audiological diagnostic devices; non-invasive optical chemical sensing; and indoor/outdoor UV-...

With the cooperation with INOX Leisure, an India multiplex chain, Samsung has announced that its Cinema LED, Onyx, has launched in Mumbai, the land of Bollywood. Samsung has announced its partnership with PVR Cinemas in August to launch the first Onyx Cinema LED displays in New Delhi. Working with INOX, Samsung now debut the second LED cinema screen in Mumbai. The company plans to install around 20 LED cinema displays all over India by the end of 2019. (Image: Samsung India) “With INOX Onyx, welcome true colors, bring alive t...

LEDVANCE announced that the company will change its manufacturing structure for increasing the integration with its parent company MLS while intensifying the competitiveness of the company in the U.S. and Canada. Meanwhile, LEDVANCE also revealed that its factory in Versailles which produces conventional lighting fixtures will be closed. LEDVANCE has been shifting its production focus from traditional lamps to smart lighting products in the past few years. The acquisition of MLS, the Chinese LED lighting producer, in 2017 has accelerated the transfo...

WitsView, a division of TrendForce, released the latest report for gaming monitors (with a frame rate above 100Hz), noting that the shipments of gaming monitors would reach 5.1 million units in 2018 with an annual growth of 100 percent. The gaming market has been expanding in recent years with promotions such as gaming sport, bringing growing momentum to the PC industry and boosting the demands for high quality monitors. Many LCD monitor makers have entered the gaming monitor market which has high gross margins. In the global shipment ranking of gaming monitor makers, AS...

The fourth quarter is usually the off-peak season for the LED market. Industry players including Lextar and Macroblock have reported lukewarm business performance in November and are expecting growth in 2019 with the booming Mini LED market. Lextar posted its monthly revenue of NT$ 823 million (US$ 26.67 million) for November with a decrease of 6.5% MoM and 7.8% YoY. The company has continued its product shipments including Mini LED backlights, Mini LED RGB modules, fine-pitch displays and VCSEL packages. Meanwhile, it also focuses on further tech...

Epistar announced that it has achieved a victory in the petitions filed by Lowe’s Home Center with the United States Patent and Trademark Office which challenged the validity of five Epistar patents related to Epistar’s innovative LED filament bulb technology. The five patents are U.S. Patent No. 6,346,771, 7,560,738, 8,492,780, 8,587,020, and 8,791,467. These five patents are the subject of a pending patent infringement lawsuit brought by Epistar against Lowe’s, filed on April 28, 2017 in the United States District Court. Lowe’s petit...

Product Introduction -DOB Easlite have world-leading technology. Our lights use DOB( Driver on Board). It means we combine the Driver with the light board, so that no external power driver (POWER) is needed to illuminate. With DOB, the lighting industry can be more advanced and easy to use. Easlite DOB can be solely used or directly on the lamps, such as airtight light, ceiling light, high bay light and street light.  Because of wide application range, all kinds of lighting fixtures can be brighten by Easlite DOB. Meanwhile, lamps are lighte...

An international team discovered a single material which produces white light to improve LED lighting efficiency. The renewable energy research was recently published in Nature with the article contributed by researchers from The University of Toledo, Monash University, Jilin University, University of Toronto, Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wuhan University. (Image: Pixabay) Dr. Yanfa Yan, professor of physics at The University of Toledo, explained, "Due to its high efficiency, this new material can potentially replace the curre...

Horticulture LED lighting has opened a new horizon for farming. Indoor farming, vertical farming and many other alternative ways to grow crops free the weather limits for food production. Now, British scholars at University of Nottingham suggested that abandoned underground coal mines could be suitable environments for growing vegetables. With hydroponic systems and LED lighting, crops can be grown in subterranean environments some advantages. For example, groundwater could be directly used in the hydroponic systems. Besides, crop production is unaffected by climatic or sea...

Researchers at the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology have developed LEDs comprising infrared colloidal quantum dots that enable high efficiency and low cost CMOS integration. Colloidal quantum dots are extremely small semiconductor particles which are as small as a few nanometers in size. Featured with small size, CQDs offer unique optical and electronic properties including absorbing and emitting light. Moreover, their properties change with their size and shape, smaller quantum dots emit in the blue range while larger quantum dots emit in the red. (Ima...

Apple has applied a patent related to optoelectronics devices for improving LiDAR sensors and applications, reported Patently Apple. The report said that Apple noted the demands for applications using 3D sensing and imaging systems and proposed enhanced technologies to integrate LiDAR and VCSEL for advanced 3D image technology. The new patent introduce a method to combine different types of light source and laser array such as diffractive optical elements or VCSEL to develop improved 3D image devices for various applications. (Image: Apple) Patently Ap...

The LED industry has been involved in the trade war between the United States and China as LED components and related lighting products were included in the list of extra tariffs. LEDinside has been tracking the impacts of the trade war, which is believed to have led to the aggravation of oversupply in the LED industry. The two countries have recently reached a trade truce by suspending the new tariffs for 90 days. However, LEDinside believes that the delay would bring increased uncertainty into the LED industry. Figo Wang, senior analyst of LEDinside, pointed...

Eaton announced that it has reached a settlement in the patent infringement lawsuit it filed against Cordelia Lighting and Jimway. The settlement ends a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia filed in 2016. As part of the settlement, Cordelia and Jimway will receive a license to the Eaton patents asserted in the District Court case. (Image: Eaton Lighting) “Protecting the intellectual property in our innovative lighting portfolio is something we take very seriously,” said Kraig Kasler, president, Lighting Division, ...

Idemitsu Kosan announces that it will build a facility for OLED material manufacturing in Chengdu, China in order to accommodate the growing demand for OLED materials in China and to enhance technical support to Chinese customers. Idemitsu Kosan aims to expand its OLED production in China targeting the increasing Chinese market for OLED applications. The company will construct its third OLED material plant in China after its factory in Japan and Korea. The construction is expected to be completed in November 2019 and the commercial production is schedul...

Kunsthalle Mannheim (Mannheim Museum of Modern Art) was designed as an extension of the city of Mannheim, which is known as the “city of squares” because of its ordered structure of blocks in a chessboard pattern. The new cube-style museum building is therefore divided into smaller units with thirteen galleries interlinked by bridges, stairs and terraces. (Image: Tridonic) Some of the rooms are open up to daylight from windows and glazing units, while others appear as introverted cabinets and halls. The various room situations make the lighting design of the mus...