Seoul Semiconductor has announced its revenue for the second quarter of 2018 to be KRW 290 billion (US$ 259.84 million), which meets the company’s target of KRW 280 to 300 billion. 

Taiwanese semiconductor equipment supplier Gallant Precision Machining (GPM) reported that the company has prepared for equipment to produce Micro LED, including facilities of LED picking, washing, mass transferring and testing. The facilities are now at the experimental phase.

Signify released the company’s business performance result for the second quarter and first half of 2018. The highlights are as follows: 

The Taiwanese backlight module and projector producer Coretronic held the earnings conference call of Q2 on July 24th and claimed that the company’s business has not been influenced by the tariff imposed by the U.S. government.

LG Innotek announced that the company has filed a lawsuit against Evergreat, a U.S. based UV nail dryer manufacturer, for patent infringement. The lawsuit alleges that Evergreat used LG Innotek's LED chip technology patents in all of its 10 UV nail dryer models without its permission. 

Taiwanese panel producer AUO has reported its revenue for the second season of 2018 and revealed that the company expects to release Mini LED displays for gaming monitors or gaming notebooks in the second half of 2018.

The LED lighting technology development has brought people even closer to nature. Signify, the Dutch lighting giant previously known as Philips, has provided Puerto de la Cruz, a city on the north coast of Tenerife, Canary Islands, with its smart street lightings which use special optics to decrease light spillage that intervene sky observation.

According to the research of LEDinside, the market scale of LED plant lighting is estimated to grow to US$ 633 million by 2022, with a CAGR of 30% during 2018-2022. Many LED producers have entered the market of horticulture lighting to share the expanding opportunities when the demands in the general lighting market are relatively weak. LEDinside has collected the updates of horticultural applications from LED firms of the world. 

The leading Japanese LED producer, Nichia Corporation released the news that the company decided to expand LED production capacity by building a new plant in response to the increasing demands of lighting and backlight LEDs as well as the applications for automotive use and others.

At New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, the Audubon Zoo opened a new exhibition named “Criaturas de la Noche” (Creatures of the Night) which is a transparent flyway installed with Altman’s Chalice LED series to create a night environment as a home for more than 200 bats. 

The tariff imposed on Chinese imported products to the U.S. was effective since July 6th. Previously the U.S. government has announced that the U.S. will enforce 25 percent tariffs on 818 Chinese goods which are in total worth about US$34 billion. And on July 10th, the Trump administration proposed additional tariffs on US$200 billion worth of Chinese goods.

The price competition of blue LED continues and has impacted the revenue of the Taiwanese LED chip maker, Epistar. Facing the challenges, the company plans to expand the production of four-element LED and to increase the proportion of Mini LED products in blue LED.

Taiwanese LED driver IC provider Macroblock has become a supplier of Samsung’s display products and might benefit from Samsung’s mass production of Micro LED displays.

Nokia has announced its commercial partnership with Current by GE for applying smart city technology to Canadian cities to improve infrastructures and citizen services.

The U.S. based molded glass manufacturer Kopp Glass has announced its research“The Effects of UV Glass Optics on UV LED Arrays,” which presents how molded optics can be used to increase UV LED efficiency and performance.

A project named UnMast City was initiated by NGOs and supported by professionals in National Health Service in England to fight against the air pollution in London. The project highlights the toxic air crisis by designing a customized LED light mask which changes color to indicate the air quality. 

Cree has reported the assignment of the company’s new CFO, Neill Reynold. The appointment will be effective on August 27th 2018. Reynolds will succeed Mike McDevitt at that time, per the transition plan announced in June.

After Apple introduced 3D sensing technology in iPhone X last year, the technology has caught the eye of the market as well as its key component, VCSEL. The suppliers have been boosting the manufacturing of VCSEL since then but as the sale of iPhone X did not meet expectations, the in-stock 3D sensing component also influenced the revenue of suppliers. 

General Electric (GE) announced its plan to restructure the company in November 2017 with the intention to cut off its lighting business and to narrow the focus on three sectors, aviation, power and renewable businesses. 

LED plant lighting market scale reaches about USD 224 Million in 2018, and the market scale of LEDs for plant lighting is about USD 58.5 Million. LEDinside estimates that the market scale of LED plant lighting and LEDs will rapidly grow to USD 633 Million and 151 Million by 2022, with CAGR of 30% and 27% during 2018-2022 respectively.

Cochlear implant is a device using electrodes to stimulate the auditory nerve to help hearing-impaired people to “hear.” But it cannot deliver complex sound as the electrode current does not move from the electrode to an auditory neuron directly. Researchers have been exploring the possibilities to replace electricity with light in cochlear implants via optogenetics technology.

After showcasing “The Wall” for the first time at CES 2018 in January, Samsung did not stop moving forward with its progress of Micro LED display. The South Korean display giant announced during a press conference that it is ready to mass produce The Wall display for both commercial and home entertainment use.

Samsung revealed the cinema LED “Onyx” last year in Seoul and the product has been expanded into the international market including the U.S., China, Mexico Thailand and other countries. 

On July 18th, the second working meeting for establishing LED filament standards was successfully held at the head office of Shanghai Wellmax Lighting (WELLMAX)- a top lighting company and the key member of the CSA. Organized by China Solid State Lighting Alliance (CSA), the meeting gathered experts and engineers from reputable companies such as Osram, MLS and Bore to further discuss the standard for LED filament. 

LEDinside hosted Micro LEDforum 2018 last week in Taipei, Taiwan and welcomed international speakers and attendees to join the pioneer event of the industry. Several leading institutes shared their innovative approaches of Micro LED and the technology of mass transfer is definitely the biggest focus. QMAT and Tesoro Scientific, two U.S. based start-up companies, introduced innovative materials and equipment concepts to enable ultra-fast mass transfer methods.

LiDAR sensor (LiDAR – Light Detection And Ranging) detects surrounding objects and captures their distance to the sensor by emitting a very short light pulse and measuring the time that the light travels from the sensor to the object and back. LiDAR is a key technology for several applications including autonomous vehicles, intelligent transportation system, drone, measurement, sweeping robot and others. According to the 2018 Infrared Sensing Application Market Report by LEDinside, LiDAR laser market value is expected to reach USD 154 million in 2020.

A research center of Korea Aerospace University and an audio technology company, Sonictier initiated a joint project to develop a 25 square meter LED display module that is capable of passing sound through its holes.

Osram Opto Semiconductors launched a new infrared LED with a narrower beam angle which allows the illumination unit to be designed without additional secondary optics.

On July 12, 2018 (Japan time), Nitride Semiconductor Co., Ltd. ("Nitride") filed a patent infringement lawsuit with the Tokyo District Court against Digi-Key Corporation d/b/a Digi-Key Electronics ("Digi-Key"), which sells UV-LED products on the internet that are manufactured by RayVio Corporation ("RayVio"), a CA-based UV-LED manufacturer, and RayVio. In the complaint, Nitride is seeking injunction(including destruction of infringing products) and damages, asserting that Digi-Key and RayVio infringe Nitride’s patent (JP 3,285,341, “Method for Manufacturing Gallium Nitride Compound Semiconductor”) by manufacturing and selling the UV-LED products

The 2018 Micro LEDforum, hosted by LEDinside, ended on 12 July. This time, experts from various fields were invited to share the six bottlenecks in the Micro LED manufacturing process. In the mass transfer section, this time we invited Uniqarta, SelfArray, eLux, QMAT and KIMM to talk about the features of various transfer technologies and future potential.