Category Archives: LED Packaging and Testing

Kateeva today announced that it has closed its Series E funding round with $88 million in new financing.

The Silicon Valley technology leader disrupted the flat panel display industry when it launched a breakthrough equipment solution to mass-produce flexible Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs). Flexible OLED technology gives limitless stretch to new product design innovation by liberating panel manufacturers from the constraints of glass substrates. It enables ultra-thin, feather-light displays that are bendable, roll-able, and even fold-able. Kateeva’s solution, known as the YIELDjet™ platform, leverages inkjet printing with novel innovations to perform critical steps in the OLED manufacturing process. Today, YIELDjet tools are helping to accelerate the adoption of OLED technology — a trend that’s taking the global display industry to exciting new heights.

The new Kateeva investors are: BOE, Cybernaut Venture, GP Capital Shanghai, Redview Capital, and TCL Capital, all located in China. They join existing investors that include: Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC), Sigma Partners, Spark Capital, Madrone Capital Partners, DBL Partners, New Science Ventures, and VEECO Instruments, Inc.

The company has raised $200 million since it was founded in 2008.

New Board seats will be filled by an executive from BOE, Redview Capital, and TCL Capital respectively.

The funds will accelerate new product development. The money will also help Kateeva expand manufacturing capacity at its Silicon Valley headquarters, where production systems are being built. In addition, the funds will strengthen Kateeva’s customer satisfaction infrastructure in Asia, and support continued R&D.

The round closes as demand for flexible OLED displays soars. This year, the market for plastic and flexible OLED displays will reach $2.1 billion, says Guillaume Chansin, Ph.D., Senior Technology Analyst at research firm IDTechEx. By 2020, it will surpass $18 billion. While mobile phones and wearables are currently the two main applications, Chansin expects that the technology will be found in tablets and automotive in the coming years.

The market trajectory is due to the confluence of two trends: first, voracious demand for flexible devices made possible by the enabling advantages of OLED technology; and second, the introduction of manufacturing tools like Kateeva’s YIELDjet platform that provided a pathway to cost-effective mass-production of flexible OLEDs for the first time.

Kateeva Chairman and CEO Alain Harrus, Ph.D. noted how OLED technology first transformed the viewing experience by giving spectacular color quality and brightness to rigid displays on mobile phones. “Now, it’s giving extraordinary new shape, lightness and thinness to those products and others that have yet to be invented,” he said. “Kateeva started enabling this “freedom from glass” display innovation in 2008 when our founders began pioneering a superior mass-production equipment solution for OLEDs. Today, Kateeva tools are positioned in top OLED manufacturing fabs. Our investors were stalwart partners along the way. We’re grateful for their support, and we welcome our new investors.”

Flexible OLED is the first major application for Kateeva’s YIELDjet platform, according to President and Co-Founder Conor Madigan, Ph.D. “Next up is OLED TV,” he said. “Having mastered the technical challenges of mass-producing Thin Film Encapsulation (TFE) — the layer that gives thinness and flexibility to the OLED device, we’re now applying YIELDjet technology to help display manufacturers mass-produce the OLED RGB layer, which enables OLED TVs. The new funds will accelerate new product development, and support ongoing R&D.”

Kateeva executives will be present at Display Week 2016. The premier international symposium for the display industry will be held May 22-27 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, Calif. President and Co-Founder Conor Madigan, Ph.D. will present on Kateeva’s technology on Monday, May 23. Chairman and CEO Alain Harrus, Ph.D. will speak at the Investors Conference on Tuesday, May 24.

Standard solutions and devices are compared to a 60 V MOSFET with monolithic Schottky diode as evaluated in SMPS and motor control environments.

BY FILIPPO SCRIMIZZI and FILADELFO FUSILLO, STMicroelectronics, Stradale Primosole 50, Catania, Italy

On synchronous rectification and in bridge configuration, RDSon and Qg are not the only requirements for power MOSFETs. In fact, the dynamic behavior of intrinsic body-drain diode also plays an important role in the overall MOSFET performances. The forward voltage drop (VF,diode) of a body-drain diode impacts the device losses during freewheeling periods (when the device is in off-state and the current flows from source to drain through the intrinsic diode); the reverse recovery charge (Qrr) affects not only the device losses during the reverse recovery process but also the switching behavior, as the voltage spike across the MOSFET increases with Qrr. So, low VFD and Qrr diodes, like Schottky, can improve overall device performance, especially when mounted in bridge topologies or used as synchronous rectifiers—especially at high switching frequency and for long diode conduction times. In this article, we compare standard solutions and devices to a 60 V MOSFET with monolithic Schottky diode as evaluated in SMPS and motor control environments.

Intrinsic MOSFET body-drain diode and Schottky features

In FIGURE 1, the typical symbol for an N-channel Power MOSFET is depicted. The intrinsic body-drain diode is formed by the p-body and n–drift regions and is shown in parallel to the MOSFET channel.

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Once a Power MOSFET is selected, the integral body diode is fixed by silicon characteristic and device design. As the intrinsic body diode is paralleled to the device channel, it is important to analyze its static and dynamic behavior, especially in applications where the body diode conducts. So, maximum blocking voltage and forward current have to be considered in reverse and forward bias, while, when the diode turns-off after conducting, it is important to investigate the reverse recovery process (FIGURE 2). When the diode goes from forward to reverse bias, the current doesn’t reduce to zero immediately, as the charge stored during on-state has to be removed. So, at t = t0, the diode commutation process starts, and the current reduces with a constant and slope (-a), fixed only by the external inductances and the supply voltage. The diode is forward biased until t1, while from t1 to t2, the voltage drop across the diode increases, reaching the supply voltage with the maximum reverse current at t=t2. The time interval (t3-t0) is defined as reverse recovery time (trr) while the area between negative current and zero line is the reverse recovery charge (Qrr).The current slope during tB is linked mainly to device design and silicon characteristics.

Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 12.08.59 PM

The classification of soft and snap recovery is based on the softness factor: Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 12.09.58 PMthis parameter can be important in many applications. The higher the softness factor, the softer the recovery. In fact, if tB region is very short, the effect of quick current change with the circuit intrinsic inductances can produce undesired voltage overshoot and ringing. This voltage spike could exceed the device breakdown voltage: moreover, EMI performances worsen. As shown in Fig. 2, during diode recovery, high currents and reverse voltage can produce instantaneous power dissipation, reducing the system efficiency. Moreover, in bridge topologies, the maximum reverse recovery current of a Low Side device adds to the High Side current, increasing its power dissipation up to maximum ratings. In switching applications, like bridge topologies, buck converters, or synchronous rectification, body diodes are used as freewheeling elements. In these cases, reverse recovery charge (Qrr) reduction can help maximize system efficiency and limit possible voltage spike and switching noise at turn-off. One strategy to reach this target to integrate a Schottky diode in the MOSFET structure. A Schottky diode is realized by an electrical contact between a thin film of metal and a semiconductor region. As the current is mainly due to majority carriers, Schottky diode has lower stored charge, and consequently, it can be switched from forward to reverse bias faster than a silicon device. An additional advantage is its lower forward voltage drop (≈0.3 V) than Si diodes, meaning that a Schottky diode has lower losses during the on state.

Embedding the Schottky diode in a 60V power MOSFET is the right device choice when Qrr and VF,diode have to be optimized to enhance the overall system performance. In FIGURE 3, the main electrical parameters of standard and integrated Schottky devices (same BVDSS and die size) are reported.

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Benefits of Mono Schottky in a power management environment

In a synchronous buck converter (FIGURE 4), a power MOSFET with integrated Schottky diode can be mounted as a Low Side device (S2) to enhance the overall converter performance.

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In fact, Low Side body diode conduction losses (Pdiode,cond) and reverse recovery losses (PQrr) are strictly related to the diode forward voltage drop (VF,diode) and its reverse recovery charge (Qrr):

Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 12.09.20 PM

As shown in (1) and (2), these losses increase with the switching frequency, the converter input voltage, and the output current. Moreover, the dead time, when both FETs are off and the current flows in the Low Side body diode, seriously affects the diode conduction losses: with long dead times, a low diode forward voltage drop helps to minimize its conduction losses, therefore increasing the efficiency. In FIGURE 5, the efficiency in a 60W, 48V – 12V, 250 kHz synchronous buck converter is depicted.

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Now, considering isolated power converters’ environment, when the output power increases and the dead time values are high, the right secondary side synchronous rectifier should have not only RDSon as low as possible to reduce conduction losses, but also optimized body diode behavior (in terms of Qrr and VF,diode) in order to reduce diode losses (as reported in (1) and (2)) and to minimize possible voltage spikes during turn-off transient. The 60V standard MOSFET and one with Schottky integrated devices are compared in a 500W digital power supply, formed by two power stages: power factor corrector and an LLC with synchronous rectification. The maximum output current is 42 A, while the switching frequency at full load is 80 kHz, and the dead time is 1μs. The efficiency curves are compared in FIGURE 6.

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In both topologies, the 60 V plus Schottky device shows higher efficiency in the entire current range, an improvement in overall system performance.

Switching behavior improvement in bridge topologies

In bridge topologies, reverse recovery process occurs at the end of the freewheeling period of the Low Side device (Q2 in FIGURE 7), before the High Side (Q1 in Fig. 7) starts conducting. The resulting recovery current adds to the High Side current (as previously explained). Together with the extra-current on the High Side device, the Low Side reverse recovery and its commutation from Vds ≈ 0 V to Vdc can produce spurious bouncing on the Low Side gate- source voltage, due to induced charging of Low Side Ciss (input capacitance) via Crss (Miller capacitance).

Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 12.09.38 PM

As a consequence, the induced voltage on Q2 gate could turn-on the device, worsening system robustness and efficiency. A Low Side device, in bridge configuration, should have soft commutation, without dangerous voltage spikes and high frequency ringing across drain and source. This switching behavior can be achieved using power MOSFETs with integrated Schottky diode as Low Side devices. In fact, the lower reverse recovery charge (Qrr) has a direct impact on the overshoot value. In fact, the higher the Qrr, the higher the overshoot. Lower values for Vds overshoot and ringing reduce the spurious voltage bouncing on the Low Side gate, limiting the potential risk for a shoot-through event. Furthermore, soft recovery enhances overall EMI performances, as the switching noise is reduced. In FIGURE 8 are shown the High Side turn-on waveforms for standard and embedded Schottky devices; purple trace (left graph) and green trace (right graph) are Low Side gate-source voltages. The device with Schottky diode shows a strong reduction of Low Side spurious bouncing.

Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 12.09.47 PM

Summary

In many applications (synchronous rectification for indus- trial and telecom SMPS, DC-AC inverter, motor drives), choosing the right MOSFET means not only considering RDSon and Qg but also evaluating the static and dynamic behavior of the intrinsic body-drain diode. A 60V “F7” power MOSFET with integrated Schottky diode ensures optimized performances in efficiency and commutation when a soft reverse recovery with low Qrr is required. Furthermore, the low VF,diode value achieves higher efficiency when long freewheeling periods or dead-times are present in the application.

References

1. “Fundamental of Power Semiconductor Devices”, B.J.Baliga – 2008, Springer Science

Dow Corning will present an exclusive glimpse of upcoming products and technologies at LIGHTFAIR International 2016 (Booth #3657), and showcase new advances in LED lamp and luminaire lighting that its broad commercial portfolio of cutting-edge optical silicone solutions are enabling worldwide.

“Three years ago, Dow Corning’s optical silicones technology sparked a surge of breakthrough innovations in LED lighting designs, and the demand for these uniquely advanced materials has only grown as the industry seeks to maintain the momentum they have helped build,” said Hugo da Silva, global industry director for LED lighting at Dow Corning. “Dow Corning is as committed as ever to working closely with customers to expand on their early successes, and formulate new optical silicone solutions to help them usher in the next-generation of LED illumination.”

Dow Corning will offer an early glimpse at LIGHTFAIR 2016 of at least one of those upcoming optical silicone solutions – Dow Corning MS-4002 Moldable Silicone. Planned for launch later this year, this high-performing material signals the latest advance in the company’s award-winning Moldable Silicone portfolio. Currently in development and testing, MS-4002 Moldable Silicone aims to offer the optimum balance of material toughness for reaching high IP and IK ratings, high light transmittance rate and smooth surface feel for secondary optics in LED lamp and luminaire applications for both indoor and outdoor.

As the global leader in silicone innovation and technology, Dow Corning is changing the game for LED design, and the company will show exactly how during LIGHTFAIR 2016. The booth will feature the company’s broad and growing range of proven solutions at three corner kiosks, focusing on:

  • Dow Corning Moldable Silicones, where visitors can explore how these materials are delivering proven solutions for enhancing the optical quality, efficiency and reliability of lamp and luminaire designs
  • Protection & Assembly Solutions, where customer products illustrate how Dow Corning’s innovative silicone protection, assembly and optical solutions have helped develop products with longer life cycles and greater efficiency in outdoor/architectural, interior/specialty, display and automotive lighting applications
  • Silicone-Enabled Designs demonstrating new ways to shape, direct and diffuse light more efficiently with Dow Corning Optical Silicones. Visitors can also explore how silicone materials have expanded innovative design possibilities as LumenFlow Corp. takes them step by step through the LED design ideas process

In addition to offering an exclusive sneak peek at upcoming technologies, Dow Corning Lighting experts will be on hand to discuss the unique design flexibilities, proven reliability and simpler processability enabled by Dow Corning’s optical silicones. A market leader in materials, expertise and collaborative innovation for LED lighting concepts, Dow Corning offers solutions that span the entire LED value chain, adding reliability and efficiency for sealing, protecting, adhering, cooling and shaping light across all lighting applications.

LIGHTFAIR International is the world’s largest annual architectural and commercial lighting trade show and conference. Held at San Diego’s Convention Center from April 26-28, this year’s edition is expected to attract over 28,000 design, lighting, architectural, design, engineering, energy, facility and industry professionals from around the world to set future trends for lighting, design and technology innovation.

LED Taiwan, the most influential LED exhibition in Taiwan, is organized by SEMI and the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA). Opening at TWTC Nangang Exhibition Hall in Taipei on April 13-16, the four-day event features theme pavilions, industry forums, TechSTAGE and academic paper presentations. The Taiwan International Lighting Show (TiLS) is co-located. With 748 booths and 238 exhibitors demonstrating the local LED supply chains’ R&D capabilities, LED Taiwan is expected to attract over 16,000 visitors from Taiwan and internationally.

Research firm Strategies Unlimited estimates that the global LED packaging market had US$15.6 billion revenue in 2014. The market is expected to grow to US$22 billion by 2019, 45 percent from lighting applications. However, as the price of white LEDs continues to fall, new applications are regarded as the key to higher earnings. Prospects of niche-market applications like IR LED and UV LED look good, while automotive LED lights are becoming another important market with greater demand for high-power chips.

Five theme pavilions to fully demonstrate a complete LED industry chain

To satisfy the market’s demand for LED in an era of IoT, LED Taiwan 2016 will add three new pavilions — LED Components, Smart Lighting Technology, and Power Device — to the two existing pavilions High-Brightness LED and Sapphire. Leading players in the areas of LED equipment, materials, components and packaging ─ like Aurora Optoelectronics, Cree, Epileds, GlobalWafers, Han’s Laser, Lextar, an alliance of sapphire processing companies organized by the Metal Industries Research & Development Centre, Rapitech, Rubicon and Wei Min Industrial ─ will all showcase their products in the exhibition to help local and foreign visitors understand the structure, manufacturing processes and technologies of Taiwan’s LED industry.

Event to feature the results of innovation in five areas

To enable innovation and bring more energy to the local LED industry, TechSTAGE will be held as part of this year’s LED Taiwan event, showcasing Taiwan’s LED R&D capability in the areas of LED

Manufacturing Equipment & Materials, Power Device Technology, Sapphire Processing Technology & Application, LED Advanced Technologies, and Smart Lighting & Automobile Lighting.

Seeking more possibilities with innovative materials and power devices

As awareness about energy conservation increases around the world and the market seeks better profits and opportunities, more companies are investing in power device R&D and production. This has prompted LED Taiwan to focus on the hot topic of power devices this year, and in addition to a special pavilion for the segment, the event will also organize a forum for vendors to discuss and understand trends and development concerning this technology.

International forums to explore key issues in the industry

As the LED market is gradually maturing, companies in the industry are aggressively seeking new applications and “blue ocean” strategies. In addition to visible LED applications in back-lit display, mobile phones, lighting equipment and cars, more companies have invested in the development and production of invisible LEDs. While demand continues to diversify with a focus on custom-made applications, the ability to find new opportunities in this trend, improving competitiveness and innovation, will be the key to future success. The LED Taiwan 2016 Executive Summit will discuss future trends by exploring innovation, LED lighting/non-lighting opportunities, current challenges and strategies in the market. The IR and UV Summit will focus on IR and UV LED applications in wearable devices, medical appliances and measuring equipment in a bid to help participants get a quick grasp of latest trends around the world.

Integration of resources helps boost local LED industry’s global presence

LED Taiwan is made possible with the collaboration and resources from influential organizations in the industry, including SEMI, TAITRA, the Taiwan Lighting Fixture Export Association and the Taiwan Optoelectronic Semiconductor Industry Association. Each year, foreign buyers and leading manufacturers are invited to the exposition where various business matching events, VIP luncheons and banquet meetings are arranged to help Taiwan vendors expand connections and secure business opportunities by interacting with the elite members of foreign industrial and academic circles.

“SEMI has many connections and resources in the area of LED manufacturing, and by working with the Taiwan Lighting Fixture Export Association and TAITRA, we are able to organize LED Taiwan and TiLS at the same time, ” said Terry Tsao, president of SEMI Taiwan. “In addition to showing the world the robust ecosystem of Taiwan’s LED industry and attracting more foreign buyers, we also hope that innovative technologies and academic papers announced in the forums will help integrate industrial and academic resources. We want to create more opportunities for the LED industry and make Taiwan’s outstanding R&D capabilities visible to the world.”

LED Taiwan is the most influential LED exposition in Taiwan, showcasing LED production equipment & materials, epi wafers, crystals, packaging, modules, etc., as well as related technologies and manufacturing solutions. The Taiwan International Lighting Show is co-located at LED Taiwan as a multi-purpose event facilitating technology exchanges and procurement in the areas of LED and lighting. LED Taiwan was inaugurated in 2010, and in 2015, the event attracted buyers from over 68 countries and created more than US$13 million of business.

For more information on LED Taiwan, please visit: www.ledtaiwan.org/en/

Harnessing the power of the sun and creating light-harvesting or light-sensing devices requires a material that both absorbs light efficiently and converts the energy to highly mobile electrical current. Finding the ideal mix of properties in a single material is a challenge, so scientists have been experimenting with ways to combine different materials to create “hybrids” with enhanced features.

In two just-published papers, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stony Brook University, and the University of Nebraska describe one such approach that combines the excellent light-harvesting properties of quantum dots with the tunable electrical conductivity of a layered tin disulfide semiconductor. The hybrid material exhibited enhanced light-harvesting properties through the absorption of light by the quantum dots and their energy transfer to tin disulfide, both in laboratory tests and when incorporated into electronic devices. The research paves the way for using these materials in optoelectronic applications such as energy-harvesting photovoltaics, light sensors, and light emitting diodes (LEDs).

According to Mircea Cotlet, the physical chemist who led this work at Brookhaven Lab’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, “Two-dimensional metal dichalcogenides like tin disulfide have some promising properties for solar energy conversion and photodetector applications, including a high surface-to-volume aspect ratio. But no semiconducting material has it all. These materials are very thin and they are poor light absorbers. So we were trying to mix them with other nanomaterials like light-absorbing quantum dots to improve their performance through energy transfer.”

One paper, just published in the journal ACS Nano, describes a fundamental study of the hybrid quantum dot/tin disulfide material by itself. The work analyzes how light excites the quantum dots (made of a cadmium selenide core surrounded by a zinc sulfide shell), which then transfer the absorbed energy to layers of nearby tin disulfide.

“We have come up with an interesting approach to discriminate energy transfer from charge transfer, two common types of interactions promoted by light in such hybrids,” said Prahlad Routh, a graduate student from Stony Brook University working with Cotlet and co-first author of the ACS Nano paper. “We do this using single nanocrystal spectroscopy to look at how individual quantum dots blink when interacting with sheet-like tin disulfide. This straightforward method can assess whether components in such semiconducting hybrids interact either by energy or by charge transfer.”

The researchers found that the rate for non-radiative energy transfer from individual quantum dots to tin disulfide increases with an increasing number of tin disulfide layers. But performance in laboratory tests isn’t enough to prove the merits of potential new materials. So the scientists incorporated the hybrid material into an electronic device, a photo-field-effect-transistor, a type of photon detector commonly used for light sensing applications.

As described in a paper published online March 24 in Applied Physics Letters, the hybrid material dramatically enhanced the performance of the photo-field-effect transistors-resulting in a photocurrent response (conversion of light to electric current) that was 500 percent better than transistors made with the tin disulfide material alone.

“This kind of energy transfer is a key process that enables photosynthesis in nature,” said Chang-Yong Nam, a materials scientist at Center for Functional Nanomaterials and co-corresponding author of the APL paper. “Researchers have been trying to emulate this principle in light-harvesting electrical devices, but it has been difficult particularly for new material systems such as the tin disulfide we studied. Our device demonstrates the performance benefits realized by using both energy transfer processes and new low-dimensional materials.”

Cotlet concludes, “The idea of ‘doping’ two-dimensional layered materials with quantum dots to enhance their light absorbing properties shows promise for designing better solar cells and photodetectors.”

Becoming crystal clear


April 6, 2016

Using state-of-the-art theoretical methods, UCSB researchers have identified a specific type of defect in the atomic structure of a light-emitting diode (LED) that results in less efficient performance. The characterization of these point defects could result in the fabrication of even more efficient, longer lasting LED lighting.

“Techniques are available to assess whether such defects are present in the LED materials and they can be used to improve the quality of the material,” said materials professor Chris Van de Walle, whose research group carried out the work.

In the world of high-efficiency solid-state lighting, not all LEDs are alike. As the technology is utilized in a more diverse array of applications — including search and rescue, water purification and safety illumination, in addition to their many residential, industrial and decorative uses — reliability and efficiency are top priorities. Performance, in turn, is heavily reliant on the quality of the semiconductor material at the atomic level.

“In an LED, electrons are injected from one side, holes from the other,” explained Van de Walle. As they travel across the crystal lattice of the semiconductor — in this case gallium-nitride-based material — the meeting of electrons and holes (the absence of electrons) is what is responsible for the light that is emitted by the diode: As electron meets hole, it transitions to a lower state of energy, releasing a photon along the way.

Occasionally, however, the charge carriers meet and do not emit light, resulting in the so-called Shockley-Read-Hall (SRH) recombination. According to the researchers, the charge carriers are captured at defects in the lattice where they combine, but without emitting light.

The defects identified involve complexes of gallium vacancies with oxygen and hydrogen. “These defects had been previously observed in nitride semiconductors, but until now, their detrimental effects were not understood,” explained lead author Cyrus Dreyer, who performed many of the calculations on the paper.

“It was the combination of the intuition that we have developed over many years of studying point defects with these new theoretical capabilities that enabled this breakthrough,” said Van de Walle, who credits co-author Audrius Alkauskas with the development of a theoretical formalism necessary to calculate the rate at which defects capture electrons and holes.

The method lends itself to future work identifying other defects and mechanisms by which SRH recombination occurs, said Van de Walle.

“These gallium vacancy complexes are surely not the only defects that are detrimental,” he said. “Now that we have the methodology in place, we are actively investigating other potential defects to assess their impact on nonradiative recombination.”

Samsung Electronics Co. and Daintree Networks said they are collaborating on joint solutions involving Samsung’s smart lighting module (SLM).

According to a release, Samsung’s SLM, which will be integrated with LED luminaires from lighting OEMs, enables greater intelligence through device-level processing, as well as enhanced connectivity through multiple embedded communications technologies, including the open standard ZigBee protocol. Combining Samsung’s SLM technology with the Daintree Networks ControlScope networked wireless control solution makes new Internet of Things (IoT) applications possible for smart buildings.

Dr. Jacob Tarn, Executive Vice President, LED Business Team, Samsung Electronics, said, “Samsung’s SLM technology will make all devices connected to it, from LED luminaires to sensors to future control products, even smarter. Because SLM is the key for a wide variety of smart lighting applications, our customers can achieve fast time-to-market and their luminaires can be optimized for many different smart lighting environments. By partnering with Daintree Networks, with their ControlScope solution, we will support traditional lighting control as well as enable new sensor-driven applications. For example, by connecting third-party occupancy sensors to our SLM technology, ControlScope customers will be able to more accurately monitor occupant patterns that can improve business operations and enhance security in retail environments.”

“Our partnership with Samsung reinforces our commitment to provide open wireless networking solutions to enable the Enterprise Internet of ThingsTM (E-IoTTM),” said Derek Proudian, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Daintree Networks. “The unique architecture found in Samsung’s SLM is a great match for the advanced technology in ControlScope and further demonstrates connected LED lighting as the natural infrastructure for smart buildings across retail, office and industrial environments. With an expanding array of open standard control devices and open software innovation, Daintree is accelerating the development of high-value business outcomes for our enterprise customers. We are excited to collaborate with Samsung to advance our industry.”

ControlScope is an open standards-based mesh networking control solution and enterprise IoT platform. Daintree Networks provides the in-building wireless network communications and cloud-based intelligent control software, and customers are free to choose from a variety of third-party control devices including sensors, fixtures, programmable thermostats.

The industrial semiconductor market will post an 8 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), as revenue rises from $43.5 billion in 2014 to $59.5 billion in 2019. Increased capital spending and continued economic growth, especially in the United States, will spur demand and industrial semiconductor sales growth, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), a global source of critical information and insight. Commercial aircraft, LED lighting, digital video surveillance, climate control, traction and medical devices are driving most of the global demand for industrial semiconductors.

The greatest semiconductor growth will come from LEDs, which is expected to reach $14.5 billion in 2019, stemming from the global LED lighting boom. Discrete power transistors, thyristors, rectifiers and power diodes are expected to hit $7.8 billion in revenue, due to the policy shift toward energy efficiency in the factory automation market.

According to the IHS Industrial Semiconductors Intelligence Service, analog application-specific integrated circuits (ICs) can expect strong growth through 2019, reaching $4.7 billion in industrial markets, especially in factory automation, power and energy, and lighting. Growth will primarily come from various power management product portfolio offerings and device integration from Texas Instruments (TI), Analog Devices (ADI), NXP and other leading semiconductor firms. Microcontrollers (MCUs) are also expected to experience robust growth in the long term, growing from $4.4 billion to $6.3 billion, thanks to advances in power efficiency and integration features.

Total industrial original equipment manufacturing (OEM) factory revenue is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 5 percent, reaching $670 billion in 2019. Industrial OEM factory revenues specifically grew 6 percent in 2015 driven by increased sales in building and home-control, and military and civil aerospace sectors. High-growth categories include LED lighting, climate control, digital video surveillance products and commercial aircraft.

With its comparatively strong global economy, the United States accounted for 30 percent of all semiconductors used in industrial applications in 2015. China was the second largest industrial chip buyer, purchasing about 16 percent of all industrial semiconductors last year.

“Robust economic growth and increased capital spending in the United States is good news for industrial semiconductor suppliers, because they have the world’s largest industrial equipment makers, including General Electric, United Technologies and Boeing,” said Robbie Galoso, associate director, industrial semiconductors, IHS Technology. “Strong industrial equipment demand will further boost sales of optical semiconductors, analog chips and discretes, which are the three largest industrial semiconductor product segments.”

Soraa, a developer of GaN on GaN LED technology, today announces its support for advances in color science and the new TM-30 method released by the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES). TM-30 uses an optimized calculation method to preclude the errors found in the color-rendering index (CRI), the current industry standard.

As a leader in developing products with superior light quality, Soraa is a strong supporter of advances in color science. Illuminating the way, Soraa Chief Scientist Aurelien David served as a lead technical contributor for the new TM-30 method.

“IES’s TM-30 method offers significant progress over the CRI,” said David. “For customers, TM-30 will provide better insight in to how the colors of a light source compare to colors under natural light. And for manufacturers, the information found under TM-30—combined with other aspects of color science—will be key for developing better products and optimizing the trade-off between color rendition and other criteria of light quality.”

The TM-30 test was developed to provide a more accurate indication of the color rendition of an object by comparing the color of the object under a test source (a LED lamp, for example) to those under a reference illuminant (a standard emitter such as idealized sunlight or filament bulb, depending on the CCT).  By doing so, the test will indicate if the colors under the test source are different from natural colors—providing a more precise indication of color fidelity.

TM-30 distinguishes itself from the CRI test in two significant areas. First, it uses state-of-the-art color science to test a light source’s color rendition of more color samples, which will preclude the inaccurate predictions of rendering seen with the CRI—in particular for narrow-band sources. Second, it provides users with more information: the color fidelity index Rf is now complemented by a color gamut index Rg and by a color vector graphic, which further characterize the appearance of colors.

Soraa has posted more information about TM-30 on its website: www.soraa.com.

Demonstrating a strategy that could form the basis for a new class of electronic devices with uniquely tunable properties, researchers at Kyushu University were able to widely vary the emission color and efficiency of organic light-emitting diodes based on exciplexes simply by changing the distance between key molecules in the devices by a few nanometers.

This new way to control electrical properties by slightly changing the device thickness instead of the materials could lead to new kinds of organic electronic devices with switching behavior or light emission that reacts to external factors.

Organic electronic devices such as OLEDs and organic solar cells use thin films of organic molecules for the electrically active materials, making flexible and low-cost devices possible.

A key factor determining the properties of organic devices is the behavior of packets of electrical energy called excitons. An exciton consists of a negative electron attracted to a positive hole, which can be thought of as a missing electron.

In OLEDs, the energy in these excitons is released as light when the electron loses energy and fills the vacancy of the hole. Varying the exciton energy, for example, will change the emission color.

However, excitons are commonly localized on a single organic molecule and tightly bound with binding energies of about 0.5 eV. Thus, entirely new molecules must usually be designed and synthesized to obtain different properties from these Frenkel-type excitons, such as red, green, or blue emission for displays.

Researchers at Kyushu University’s Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics Research (OPERA) instead focused on a different type of exciton called an exciplex, which is formed by a hole and electron located on two different molecules instead of the same molecule.

By manipulating the molecular distance between the electron-donating molecule (donor) and the electron-accepting molecule (acceptor) that carry the exciplex’s hole and electron, respectively, the researchers could modify the properties of these weakly bound excitons.

“What we did is similar to placing sheets of paper between a magnet and a refrigerator,” said Associate Professor Hajime Nakanotani, lead author of the paper reporting these results published online February 26, 2016, in the journal Science Advances.

“By increasing the thickness of an extremely thin layer of organic molecules inserted as a spacer between the donor and acceptor, we could reduce the attraction between the hole and electron in the exciplex and thereby greatly influence the exciplex’s energy, lifetime, and emission color and efficiency.”

Indeed, the changes can be large: by inserting a spacer layer with a thickness of only 5 nm between a donor layer and an acceptor layer in an OLED, the emission color shifted from orange to yellowish green and the light emission efficiency increased 700%.

For this to work, the organic molecule used for the spacer layer must have an excitation energy higher than those of the donor and acceptor, but such materials are already widely available.

While the molecular distance is currently determined by the thickness of the vacuum-deposited spacer layer, the researchers are now looking into other ways to control the distance.

“This gives us a powerful way to greatly vary device properties without redesigning or changing any of the materials,” said Professor Chihaya Adachi, director of OPERA. “In the future, we envision new types of exciton-based devices that respond to external forces like pressure to control the distance and electrical behavior.”

In addition, the researchers found that the exciplexes were still formed when the spacer was 10 nm thick, which is long on a molecular scale.

“This is some of the first evidence that electrons and holes could still interact like this across such a long distance,” commented Professor Adachi, “so this structure may also be a useful tool for studying and understanding the physics of excitons to design better OLEDs and organic solar cells in the future.”

“From both scientific and applications standpoints, we are excited to see where this new path for exciton engineering takes us and hope to establish a new category of exciton-based electronics.”