Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for July 10, 2020. As I speculated in the Wednesday N&I newsletter, the ams acquisition of Osram did close yesterday according to an ams press release. We didn’t publish yet another news story as there is little to be added other than ams now holds 69% of all Osram shares. Now ams will gain a position on the Osram supervisory board and integration of the operations will commence.
It was a bit of a surprise for us when we learned of a mid-summer announcement of a major new LED family from Lumileds — the HL2X. The new family targets high-output applications including street lighting, high-bay luminaires, and even sports venue lighting. The value proposition of the new family is beam control and uniformity, which is a quality-of-light factor in the intended applications.
Of course, I have always preferred to look under the hood of LED architectures. It’s simply amazing how many different architectural approaches LED manufacturers leverage to improve performance or light quality. We covered that ground in a packaged LED feature article a few months ago. That article acknowledged that epitaxial advancements now take a backseat to architectural elements such as packaging and optics.
Lumileds has moved toward a model where it can use the same epitaxial process to deliver both chip-scale package (CSP) LEDs and traditionally packaged LEDs with identical epitaxial steps. Product developers can choose from the HL1 CSP for applications that benefit from direct-attach CSPs — think tightly-packed arrays generating broad beam patterns. Placing that same CSP LED in a package with a domed primary optic lends itself to highly-directional beams and thus the intended usages.
We also have a business-oriented story for you. Privately-held Lucidity Lights based in Boston has acquired the consumer business from troubled Evolution Lighting based in Florida. Evolution did have some inroads with major retailers. And Lucidity hopes to leverage that path to market for its products that are focused on lighting for health and wellbeing supplied direct to consumers.
Finally, there is some positive funding news in academia. Our Carrie Meadows posted a blog about a USDA grant to Cornell University to develop new higher education programs in controlled environment agriculture (CEA). As we have written before, the AgTech (agricultural technology) sector is coming more into focus for us with regard to our HortiCann Light + Tech conference, and we look forward to the blend of research, applied science, business acumen, and market analysis that event will provide
I understand we are in for a scorcher here in San Diego this weekend. I guess I was not going anywhere anyway. So let the AC compressor spin. Hope you all have a safe weekend.
You will find many more stories of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. And always feel free to contact me to discuss content we post or to pitch a contributed article.
- Maury Wright, (858) 748-6785, [email protected]