LED Knowledge Base

The revolutionary LED lighting technology is being applied more and more in the automobile industry.thanks to their apparent advantages over traditional filament lighting.Led Bulbs are brighter,longer longevity,fast echo and huge energy saving.

LED lights only spends average 1W power,in other word,it can greatly reduces the battery power cost and in turn lowers the oil consumption. In addition, these lights last much longer than the incandescence bulbs means you would save money on replacement for their life is as long as 30,000 hours.

The more significant advantage can be seen when LED lights are used in the automobile tail light,LED light bulbs have very fast response speed,comparing to a conventional bulbs using 0.2 ~ 0.3 seconds to turn on,it can be considered as lights immediately.This feature allow the follow driver to respond more promptly effectively avoid the accident of collision.

In addition,LED light can produce vivid colors is another awesome advantage, They could emit a more consistent color than a old fashion bulb.Nowadays, they are so versatile that have been produced more and more applications for interior and exterior which including but no limit to break and tail lights,turn lights,indicator lights,interior lights etc.

Aside from using for the lighting purpose, LED lights are also used for styling.They have great vision effect to make your car stands up from the crowd.The usual styling applications are under car kits, LED strips, LED logo, LED washer jet etc.

SuperFlux or High flux LEDs(Piranha LEDs) are rectangular packages of LEDs with 4 pins. Generally SuperFlux has three types of size, 3mm.5mm and falt top with four colors ,red,green,blue,white, warm white available.It is more and more used in the various lighting applications particularly in automotive industry in tail,stop and turn lights.

Below are 4 factors make SuperFlux LEDs such popular.

Superflux LEDs provide maximum flux on PCB
SuperFlux is able to emit the maximum lightness with the less power cost than other transitional LEDs.when LED lighting products are based on PCB.This feature enables LED manufacturer use less number of LEDs to attain the brightness required and lower whole product cost.SuperFlux is the definitely choice of LEDs when designing on PCB.

Superflux LEDs have good resistance against moving
The design of 4 pins fix the SuperFlux solidly, even in the rigorous situation such as vibration or collision,it will not be damaged or separated from the PCB .While the two pins LEDs apparently are easier to crack when suffers from such vibration or collision.This is why SuperFlux is widely used in the automotive tail lamps which frequently subject to heavy shocking.Superflux Leds have the best stability among all the environment.

Lowest thermal resistance
Thanks to large lead frame design,SuperFlux has the lowest thermal resistance comparing with other through- hole LEDs.When working at the same power,the temperature rise at the LED junction is only half of that at other traditional LEDs.That being said,SuperFlux is able to be working under a relatively wide range of temprature at high input power.With this advantage,superfulx is very suitable to be used in high performance applications where low thermal resistance is a must.

Broad selection of viewing angles to suit various applications
SuperFlux LEDs offer wide choice of viewing angles categories which includes 40 degree,70 degree ,90 degree,120 degree,etc.The wide viewing agnle is very important specially to the automobile tail tights,as a result SuperFlux is the best choice.These selection also give Lights engineers more options to work out a lighting solution.

During the human history ,the first generation of Lighting is very primitive oil lamp（candle),the second is the incandescence bulb invented by Edison,the third is fluorescent lamp.Now here comes the revolutionary fourth generation of lighting - white LED which is expected to dominate the lighting market in the next ten years.

Since Nick Holonyak from GE invented the first visible LED(GaAsP),at the 60’s of last century,red and green LED born,followed by yellow at 70’s,green at 90’s. Green LED plus yellow fluorescence material forms white LED.Thus,LED applications are expanded from traditional display to most promising general lighting-to replace the incandescence and fluorescent lamp.With the unparalleled advantages of energy efficient,long longevity,fast response,LED is becoming more and more popular in the lighting market.

Market

The semiconductor wafer cant emit any lights before being packaged in a bullet form,so the market is composed of two parts :EPI-Wafer and packaging.According to statistic,in 2005 the vaule of encapsulation has increase 11.4% to $6.7 billion.Japan is the largest LED production country on the world,accounting for 46% of the world market,followed by China Taiwan with 17%.It’s estimated in 2008,the value of world packaging market will be up to USD 9.1 billion,average increase rate 10.9%.

Diagram 1 Market Demand for White LED

As another statistics‘s anticipation,the global requirement of white LED is around 4.5billion pcs,as of 2008,the figure will increase to 9.8 billion which more than doubled,average increase rate closed to 30%.From that We can see how large the market potential is.The biggest application now is mobile phone,having 68% market share at 2005.Due to cell phone market is being saturated,growing slowly,it’s still the top application at 2008,but its market share fall down to 40%,while application for automobile and lighting achieve faster growth, from 10% to 22% and 2% to 15%, and for LCD TV and PC ,up to 7% and 6%.

According the study of Nomura Research Institute, Ltd.,because the high demand for mobile phone in developed country have passed ,the growth rate will slow down,along with the price of white LED decreased significantly result in the white LED market growth calculated by turnover is far less than by quantity,however its still expected in 2005~2010 there is 10% of average growth rate,from $1.74 billion to $2.84 billion.The driving force is from white LED back light source required for large dimension LCD screens and car equipments.

Diagram 2 Trends for Global Market of White LED

Manufacturing techniques of white LED are mainly held in the Japanese company which occupies 72% of whole market.Amidst of that,Nichia solely accounts for 41.2%,Citizen accounts for 17.8%,OSRAM OPTO 13.7%,Toyota Gosei 12.9%.Seeing the promising market ,through research and development and production cooperation ,many western companys including Fairchild,Agilent and Korean and Taiwan companys get involve in LED market make the competition fiercer.Not only will Nichia’s market shrink,but through all sort of rearrangement ,some new manufacturing companys will arise.

Application

In the recent two years,white LED is mostly applied for mobile phones,digital cameras,portable game consoles as the back light source.As per the stat of 2004,the application extent is very high,mobile phone 69%,digital camera 67%,digital camcorder 80%,portable game console even reach 100%.High end digital cameras and camcorders’ view fetcher and replay monitor require high quality images,so white LED is required to use as back light source.

Besides,automobile needs various of lighting,white LED as replacement product Will penetrate this market,first applied to panel and interior light,the application rate is merely 12%-24%,but It is expected that it will raise to 67% by 2008,currently average the amount of LEDs used in panel is around 18 pcs,it will be up to 25 by 2008.

Automobile lighting application includes fog lamps,turn and break lamps etc.These car lights has special requirement includes but not limit to high reliably,long life(above 10 years).White LED itself should have further improve on brightness,luminous flux,lighting efficiency,heat emission.Particular to the front lamp,now the lighting efficiency of halogen lamp in use is 17~20lm/w, luminous flux approximately 1500lm,life 300~500 hours，yet LED still cant catch up with such performances.As per expectation,car LED will increase from $5 billion at 2005 to $6 billion at 2010,another report indicates automobile adopts white LED as front lamp may account for 10% at 2008.

Diagram 3 Global car LED Market

Secondly,white LED used as back light source for PC and Television and for the general lighting has huge market growth space .The competitor for White LED used as back light source is CCFL,in the field of small dimension of mobile phone,digital camera and the like,no matter in performance or cost,not only LED surpasses CCFL，it is also very mature.But in the middle-big dimension LCD screen,white LED have large distance ,and not very mature regarding cost,heat sink,IC diver.Laptop just starts using white LED as back light source at 2005,then expanding to OA and Television,it’s estimated white LED used in these fields will be put into batch production.The application rate of LCD television will reach 10% at 2008.

As for lighting,besides traditional incandescent lamps and fluorescent lamps, other energy-saving lamps are being developed every day,it’s not a easy task for white LED to enter this market,although having high brightness,life,white LED still has shortcomings in the facet of life,heat emission,approval rate as well as the high price make it hard to get popularly.

Incandescence lamp’s efficiency of transformation from electricity to lights is only 5%-10%, fluorescent lamp is 22%~25%,whit e LED is 25%~35%.Therory white LED transformation rate can reach 90%,so when it lifts up to 50%,then,white LED will several times less than incandescence lamp and lamp in terms of energy saving and cost terms of energy saving and cost.with that being said,once white LED breaks through the barriers of technology and production scale ,needless to say it will have huge market potential.According to the statistic from Roland Haitz for last 34 years,the light output of LED doubles every 18-24 months,calculated by that,to 2025,LED will dominate the lighting market.White LED has two unparalleled advantages of energy efficiency and environmentally friendly make it definitely the best choice for general lighting.The new century of white LED lighting is coming.