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setting new standards when it comes to ecological and economical sustainability. But this is not enough to legitimise the investments in a new technology on the customers’ side. With LED becoming a real alternative to conventional light systems in general lighting, the focus is widening. Application features and costs have entered the spotlight. Customers want to know the total cost of ownership of a LED system, not only the retail price. They want reliable answers on the true lifetime costs, including maintenance, electricity and additional functions. The second trend is about additional features. Our customers expect not only a new technology but they demand new functionalities, with lower costs and truly innovative features, all of this in a standardised, simple and easy-to-deploy environment. Applicability also means that we have to work on beautifying our still very technical-looking products and therefore focus increasingly on design aspects. Moreover it is important to further enhance safety and reliability in any application. And last but not least we need to work on making LED applications easier.
Norbert Hiller, Cree General Manager, LED components: • Cree expects that 2011 will reveal a continued focus on performance improvements, which reduces cost of ownership to enable and accelerate LED lighting adoption. Increasing the scale of high performance LED production as well as the production of LEDs on larger wafers will drive costs down. At the same time we will also continue to optimise LED products for specific application requirements.
Elliet Hall-Jones, Business Development Director, IST Limited
• I expect 2011 to be a year where the adoption of LED fixtures within the marketplace will be defined into two distinct market sectors; low cost commodity products and high quality direct replacement and feature rich products. I see the commodity market being dominated by the Asian manufacturers and direct replacement being dominated by western lighting companies with a greater focus on the quality and control of light being the differentiator.
• In terms of LED drivers, I see a trend being towards companies understanding the need for high efficiency and lower power correction of drivers. Also the need to integrate existing control protocol such as Dali, 1-10V, RDM & DMX. I also see the supply of LED drivers being more critical as a number of driver
manufacturers have increased the lead- time this year as a result of extended lead-times of components. Of course the pressure will also be on to reduce the cost of LED drivers. As a result I see two distinct products emerging: a low cost standard driver and a high end feature rich product. I believe that both of these markets could be met by the adoption of digital signal processors where each individual driver can be programmed to the exact customer requirements, while utilising the standard components used on the driver. • Also with LED drivers I see a trend towards cost erosion as volumes increase especially in the white light market. However, the market will be looking for feature rich products at competitive prices. The only way to supply the demand will be to reduce components and maintain electronic design flexibility to cater for all the new LED emitter variants and this is where I believe using digital signal processing will start to lead the LED driver market as it reduces the need for IC specific drivers and is software configurable so can enable drivers to be updated in the field. • 2011 will see advanced LED drivers come to market combining several control protocols such as 0-10V, DALI, DMX, RDM in a low cost format enabling the lighting designers to provide advanced scene setting. • Finally, the battle over which future protocol platform will start to emerge, whether its wireless such as Zigbee or Power Line Control, for the control of the next generation of LED fixtures.
Conclusions Wow! What a year 2010 has been for the lighting industry! New LED product launches, advances in driver technology and record LED efficacies being shattered every few months.
At the start of the year (but only published in August) the Nichia R&D white LEDs offered tremendous lumens per watt efficacy of up to 249 lm/W or 58.5% total wall plug efficiency which is incredible considering the results are based on standard LED die sizes and not the larger dies found in the XM-L, XP-G models and Rebel-ES production models.
Even so the impressive production launch credentials of a >100lm/W warm white high-CRI Cree XP-G LED shows how quickly the LED emitter market is maturing. All LED manufacturers are now on board with what the LED design community has been looking for from LEDs: high brightness, high efficiency and excellent quality of light. I predict in 2011 there will be a much more rapid reduction of LED fixture prices than seen previously with UK manufacturers
looking to source quality LEDs from reputable top five LED manufacturers via Asian where for some reason the same LED emitters can be up to 60% lower cost than if sourced in Europe. These cost reductions can then be passed onto customers who will in turn embrace LEDs as the return on investment criteria also reduces drastically. I also predict that we may see the first production 200lm/W LED emitter enter the marketplace leading to a gradual slow down of the fast paced LED efficacy race. This could mean by the end of 2011 we may see a price of US$1 per 200 lumens cost for warm-white high CRI LEDs. Last year I predicted a whole raft of colour tuneable white light products would enter the market. However the number was greatly reduced and limited to several notable companies such as LG. The barrier for these devices may be the extra complexity of the control electronics required to keep the colour stable. However, that may change with new low- cost LED driver components entering the market in 2011.
One of the main barriers to LEDs during 2011 will be the economic situation and how Europe will handle the fall-out from collapsed members of the EU such as Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal. Government policies will play a big factor in how LED technology growth will accelerate during 2011 but if economies do fall there will be less money to spend on infrastructure!
Help reduce VAT on energy efficient lighting Finally, the start of 2011 will see an increase in the rate of VAT in the UK to 20% and I agree with David Morban from Morban Ltd who emailed me stating that LED and other energy efficient lighting technologies should have the VAT brought in line with other carbon reduction technologies which is presently at 5%. I believe reducing the VAT rate for LED and other SSL technologies down to 5% would help stimulate a growing, high technology sector of the UK economy, create new jobs and would also accelerate the adoption of energy efficient lighting with end users thus mitigating increasing energy usage and helping to reduce the UK’s carbon footprint. If you feel the same then please sign up to the reduce lighting VAT petition at:
www.petitionbuzz.com/petitions/novat and I will do my best to present the lighting community’s voice to MPs, the Treasury and ministers in the UK government.
Have a great festive holiday and a happy New Year. Don’t forget you can email me anytime you have a question relating to SSL.
g.archenhold@
mondiale.co.uk
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