Seeing the light
02 April 2010
Thought I would be like a typical plant in the spring this week and turn towards the light – or the LED to be more precise.
The reason for this sudden interest arose from a meeting I had last week with some people from Molex and Bridgelux who were introducing ‘helieon’ – essentially a standard fitting for LED modules.
The LED technology comes from Bridgelux, who have adapted a chip on metal process that provides simple (i.e. cheap) phosphor production in tandem with a high quality, low power light source. The rise and rise of the LED in many applications is one of the more optimistic sectors of the electronics industry, and there continues to be progress in terms of power usage for a given amount of light.
However, most LED applications involve designing the LED into the application. The technology is adapted for use in a particular car headlight, for example, or TV backlight or architectural spotlight. While it is great that there is a technology finding new applications all the time, its piecemeal adoption could be slowing the progress that the LED world should be seeing. The clear logic is that if anything – from cars to chocolates and motorbikes to MP3s – is made in volume it can be made cheaper. According to the companies involved in helieon, the obvious market for LEDs – mainstream lighting – has not been fully embraced because current LED-based lighting options are all bespoke and therefore represent investment and commitment if they are to used in any new or retrofit project.
Helieon is claimed to change that. Basically it uses Bridgelux LED technology in lighting modules that fit into standard fixtures that have been designed by Molex. Lighting modules can therefore be replaced if broken, but more importantly if the lighting scheme is to change (brighter, darker, softer, more focussed, etc) then the appropriate lighting module can be set into the fixture as easily as changing a light bulb.
Those who will be most interested may be interior designers, or electrical contractors perhaps, people who are looking to create a certain effect while reducing cost and increasing flexibility. I am aware that these are not the sort of people that read EMTWorldWide, but I think if this catches on it could have implications for the electronics manufacturing industry.
Every standard starts somewhere. Sometimes whole committees and organisations are responsible, like at the IPC, while on many other occasions it can be an unofficial ‘standard’ that has been lead by a particular company, like Microsoft, the Apple iPods and MAC or even the recent triumph of the Blu-ray DVD format. The important thing is that the acceptance of these standards as the norm means adoption by other suppliers and so volumes increase and the prices fall. It could be that helieon, or something like it, becomes an enabling technology for LED use, and that the consequences of lower power and lower cost products could start to pay dividends in applications beyond mainstream lighting.
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