Rogue Epoxy Causes Sticky Situation for Lumileds

LEDs Magazine – Lumileds ditches rogue epoxy, restarts production

First there were rogue waves, made famous by the movie A Perfect Storm and now a bigger threat looms menacingly on the horizon….duh…duh….DUH….ROGUE EPOXY! Ahhhhhhhhhh……..<author runs away screaming>. Rogue epoxy? What the heck, exactly, IS rogue epoxy? Did the epoxy refuse to wash it’s hands after using the mens room? Does it steal from the rich to give to the poor? If you read this article it will go on to say that Lumileds has concluded that a batch of epoxy used to make their TFFC LEDs (used in Luxeon Rebel and Luxeon K2 LEDs), was “contaminated”. Then they refer to the epoxy as “non-conforming” which had the potential to cause the LED dies to prematurely crack. Then they mention that this “rogue epoxy” has been replaced with “fresh supplies”. FRESH supplies…..Is anyone else getting the vibe that nobody was paying attention and the night guy grabbed that old, dented, leaky can of epoxy from 1998 that the Haz-Mat guy’s were supposed to come and collect six months ago and dumped it into the production hopper? Well whatever actually happened, that “rogue epoxy” sure turned out to be expensive. First the production stoppage, then the recall, then all new epoxy (should have done this anyway), and now a host of reliability testing on the quarantined new production before the final release at the end of February. Not to mention the unknown cost in PR.

Would have been cheaper to throw the night guy into the production hopper.

Just kidding

Click the link above to read the whole story from LEDs Magazine

Technorati Tags: leds, led modules, solid-state lighting, high-power leds, high power leds, ultra bright leds, super bright leds, super bright light, luxeon, lumileds, lumiled, TFFC, leuxeon rebel, luxeon k2, lumileds recall, luxeon recall, lumileds production problems, epoxy, led epoxy, contaminated led epoxy, rogue epoxy, flashlight, led flashlight, flash module, flash led, flash led module, bright white led

Powered by ScribeFire.

What is the Current Market Price for LED Under Cabinet Lighting

Calling all sales and marketing personnel….Calling all sales and marketing personnel!

Well, sales & marketing personnel in the under cabinet lighting industry anyway.

I want to pose a question to you all: What is the current market price for LED under cabinet lighting? Obviously there is high-end and low-end markets. I am interested in the market price for high-end LED under cabinet lighting. The reason I ask is that my company has a new LED under cabinet lighting fixture called the Illumaled under cabinet lighting system which is now hitting the retail and commercial distribution channels and just as it is, I am hearing buzz that the pricepoint for LED under cabinet lighting which had been about $80 per unit has now fallen to around $40 – $50 per unit. The source of the information had a product that came in at around $80 per unit and had been selling for awhile but sales have dropped dramatically which they suspect was due to the price point drop. I suspect that my source for the information is actually targeting a lower-end market since they mention the installation was for multi-unit housing.

Has anyone heard anything from distribution channels about the current market price for high-end or low-end (if there even is such a thing due to the current cost of LED lighting in general) LED cabinet lighting? What are you hearing out there?

I’m going to try and make this post sticky for awhile to give everyone a chance to see it and comment. Thanks!

Technorati Tags: leds, led modules, led luminaire, led lighting, led luminaire design, led under cabinet lighting, led under-cabinet lighting, led undercabinet lighting, led under cabinet market, marketing leds, led marketing, lighting market, lighting marketing, led sales, led luminaire sales, led market price, led under cabinet lighting market price

Bare Die Attachment? Yes, Please!

I pose a question to all of my readers (OEMs, engineers, developers, or anyone else for that matter): Have any of you worked on any LED bare die attachment projects? I would be very interested to know what the project entailed and how it went? Please comment this posting or, if you feel more comfortable, email me using the contact me tab above.

Thanks!

Technorati Tags: leds, led die, led dies, led chips, led manufacturing, bare die, bare die attachment, led bare die attachment

Got LED Lighting? Amusement Parks Need To See The Light

Here’s a question for all you LED gurus out there: Why don’t amusement parks use LEDs on their rides?

I just came back from a trip to a locally famous (i.e. not Disney or Six Flags etc..) amusement park that has been operating since 1902 and they just recently put in some fantastic new rides and I was shocked to see that these rides that are 1 – 2 years old at the most, have hundreds to thousands of big honking colored light bulbs and on some of these rides, half of the bulbs were burned out already! This made them look ugly and cheesy. This was the case all over the park.
In some applications, like automobile headlights, the switch to LEDs just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but for an amusement park, at least to me (not being a amusement park owner) it makes all the sense in the world. Amusement parks operate at extreme expense and so are always looking for ways to cut costs. It would seem to me that switching to LEDs would save the an enormous bundle of change just on the energy savings alone. Then theres the huge maintenance bill that light bulbs carry. These things are blinking and flashing which, for a light bulb, shortens it’s life to around 2000 hours (maybe less) and now you have to replace them and hire people to do it. So imagine how many people it takes and how long it takes when you have thousands of these things and many of them are 10, 20, 50 or more feet up in the air (this probably explains why the don’t change them often)! So with the switch to flashing LEDs, you get a lifecycle of about 20000 – 50000 hours: a huge difference and a tremendous cost savings. Of course all this has to be weighed against the cost of retro-fitting the existing lamps to LEDs but is there really an excuse for the amusement ride manufacturers to not utilize LEDs when their building these things? It would seem to me that it would be a huge selling point. Now with the advent of direct screw and pin lamp LED replacement, there really isn’t much of an excuse even for the amusement parks to not replace the lamps even weighed against the much higher cost of purchase for the LED lamps versus the traditional light bulbs (what’s a box of small colored lamps cost?). If these parks can get 30 million dollar loans to build new rides, they can get 1 or 2 million dollars loans to replace their lamps. The short-sighted may say well thats not going to sell tickets but I beg to differ. People may not realize it when their looking around but the clean, modern, and fully-working appearance that LEDs will afford will increase ticket sales as much as picking up litter on the pathways will. Plus, over time, the LEDs will pay for themselves (often in the first year or two as evidenced by several large building retrofit projects that have made the news lately. See my Architectural Lighting Blog) and then some.

This doesn’t even begin to touch all the accent lighting, emergency lighting, signage etc… that amusement parks continue to use traditional light bulbs in (although I did see some LED in-roads in the parks signage but not a whole lot). Just think of all the potential savings!

End rant.

Technorati Tags: leds, solid-state lighting, lighting industry news, lighting industry market, lighting market, solid-state lighting, led news, led technology, leds in the news, global industry analysts report, energy star, energy-star, energy savings, saving energy, energystar, energy efficient, municipal lighting, municipal lighting projects, led city, led cities, led-based municipal lighting, led municipal light, municipal leds, municipal light design, municipal street light, street lights, led street lights, led streetlight, led streetlights, municipal streetlight, municipal streetlights, architectural lighting, architectural lighting design, solid-state architectural lighting, led architectural lighting, architectural led lighting, lighting design, solid-state lighting, amusement park, amusement lighting, leds in amusement parks, ride engineering, ride lighting, ride design, amusement design, amusement ride design, amusement ride lighting, amusement ride leds, leds in amusement rides

LED Display Case Lighting

Here’s a case study (uggh!Pardon the pun) in the works:

Our engineering department and myself would be very interested to get any feedback you might have on tackling the issue of shelf lighting (i.e. under shelf lighting) for product illumination on low-clearance shelves in a display case. The problem is this particular customer wants uniform or near uniform illumination of the top and front face of the product from shelf to shelf when the clearance between shelves is about 10 inches or so. They currently use and are not happy with fluorescent lighting which have a short life cycle in a heated environment and cannot be adjusted for color-temp or dimmed etc… so they want to switch to LEDs. When your product is so close to the lights, what is the best way to spread the illumination across the top and front face? Have any of you done something similar? We have our own thougts on this but would love to get your’s.

Here is a 3D Sketchup render (click to shoot over to my Architectural Lighting blog for a quick article about Sketchup and the Kerkythea Renderer) of the type of case (typical, not exact) this would be employed in:

Click thumnail to view full size image

..and here is the exact same Sketchup 3D model and scene rendered in Kerkythea:

Click thumbnail to view full size image

Technorati Tags: leds, led modules, accent lighting, display case lighting, engineering lighting, light engineering, color changing light, color cycling light, rgb leds, color leds, light design, designing with light, lighting design, led display case lighting, engineering case study, led case study, led projects, projects with leds, sketchup, google sketchup, 3d software, 3d rendering, architectural visualization, visualization software, 3d rendering software, lighting design software, lighting visualization software, kerkythea, kerkythea rendering system, 3d rendering, interior lighting, light modeling, 3d modeling, lighting design tools, 3d engineering, 3d drawing, 3d models