GigaOM » Semiconductor devices

The growth and promise of the LED market

Ucilia Wang — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 19:18:38 +0000

LED production has grown tremendously, accompanied by a significant fall in prices that will further propel the sale of this energy-efficient digital-lighting technology. But challenges remain on the road to widespread adoption. Figuring out ways to use power efficiently for lighting will be crucial for a future when the world’s population will likely be much larger.

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Startup Soraa unveils game changing next-gen LED light

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:32:36 +0000

The father of the LED is now looking to revolutionize the industry he helped create. Soraa, a Silicon Valley startup co-founded by Shuji Nakamura — who created the blue laser and the white LED — officially unveiled the technology behind its LED innovation on Tuesday. The company, which is backed by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, has developed a new way to manufacturer an LED light that produces a light that is brighter, has a better quality, is more energy efficient, and saves more money than its competitors on the market.

The first light Soraa is launching is a lamp to replace a halogen bulb (called an MR16), which are commonly used in places like recessed ceiling lights and spot lights on products in stores and venues. These aren’t lamps for the everyday home owner, and Soraa is targeting commercial and industrial building owners first, before it moves to the residential market.

During an interview with Soraa CEO Eric Kim at Soraa’s factory, Kim explained to me that “light is not a commodity,” as he showed me the light from the Soraa lamp in comparison to a variety of LED competitors including giants like Philips that also make halogen replacement LEDs. Indeed in the various tests the bright white light displayed a far better quality, consistency, color and angle than the comparison light.

That type of quality would be pretty cool on its own. But Soraa’s LED light is also highly energy efficient. It uses about 75 percent less energy than incandescent and halogen bulbs, and lasts 25 times longer than halogen bulbs. For a company that’s buying lighting for a commercial building, a Soraa light can deliver a year pay back period in energy savings, said Kim.

How does it work?

Soraa’s secret sauce lies in the startup’s early bet on using the semiconductor gallium nitride for the substrate part of the light. LEDs are usually made by putting gallium nitride onto sapphire of silicon carbide substrates. But Soraa’s light places gallium nitride onto a gallium nitride substrate, enabling the core of the light itself to create better uniformity. Soraa says the combo is more cost effective and can produce more light per lamp than the traditional methods.

While the tech sounds like a perfect thing to license to the big players, Soraa is making the big bet that it can be a vertically-integrated LED manufacturer, making the substrate, chip, packaging and entire light solution. That’s always a slight risk, because that can be capital intensive, but on the other hand, the payoff and potential are a lot higher when you own the whole value chain.

Soraa is currently moving into volume commercial production at its factory in Fremont, Calif. Kim tells me at the company’s current fab, it will be able to turn into a $400 million revenue per year company.

Soraa, which was founded in 2008, is backed by Khosla Ventures, NEA and NGEN Partners and has raised over $100 million in funding.

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The dilemma of creating and cutting solar jobs

Ucilia Wang — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:31:32 +0000

Both job creation and layoffs are particularly sensitive topics during a weak economy, let alone an election year when candidates all claim to have the best antidotes to put people back to work. So the layoffs of about 200 out of roughly 300 workers at Amonix’s North Las Vegas solar equipment factory this month raised questions not just about the company’s well being but also its promise to bring lots of jobs to the local economy.

Through its manufacturing service provider, Flextronics, Amonix cut its staffing at the factory by two-thirds so it could modify the production equipment for making a new product later this year. From Amonix’s point of view, the company, backed by Kleiner Perkins, is doing what is necessary to make a new product that it plans to launch later this year, said Carla Pihowich, vice president of marketing and government affairs, on Tuesday. The plan is to start hiring more people in the second half of this year, she said. “It’s really a temporary scale-down only to scale back up,” she said.

The California-based company designs giant solar panels mounted on a mechanical arm to track the sun’s movement throughout the day. Inside each panel is a series of modules that contain lenses that concentrate the sunlight up to 500 times onto solar cells to produce power. The current panel runs 77-foot by 49-foot and produces 60 KW. Amonix won’t provide details about its new system until it’s ready to launch it, Pihowich said.

Factory re-tooling is a common step for any manufacturer who wants to roll out new products, cut manufacturing costs or both. The changes at Amonix’s plan will include “a bit more automation” to make solar energy equipment that will be more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity and cost less, Pihowich said.

She also noted that the time is right to make the transition partly because it has completed delivery for a major project – a 30 MW solar farm being built in Colorado by Cogentrix that received a $90.6 million federal loan guarantee.

Green jobs

Amonix held an opening ceremony for its $18 million factory only in May last year. So it’s making a big change in staff and machinery only after having operated for a relatively short period of time. That certainly doesn’t look good, particularly when many local and state political leaders who, along with the company, were eager to tout the jobs the new factory would provide less than a year ago. Its then CEO, Brian Robertson, who died during an airplane crash right before Christmas, said at the time that the company had committed to creating 278 jobs but ended up hiring roughly 300 workers for the factory.

But will the company re-fill the job count back to around 300? That’s not for certain. Amonix promises to re-hire more people starting in the second half of this year. The number of new hires will depend on sales and shipment demand from customers, but Pihowich declined to give an estimate on how many.

For those who felt fortunate to have lined up work at the factory, the layoff announcement was crushing. As Las Vegas Sun reported, some workers felt blindsided by how short-term their employment turned out to be. A local official told the paper that workers were brought on to handle a major project, so the positions were supposed to be temporary.

Amonix will need many more large orders to keep its factory going for the long run. The company declined to talk about the status of other projects and contracts, however. It’s worth noting that the company opened the factory during a year when the solar market experienced a glut of conventional solar panels and saw wholesale prices for them falling by 40-50 percent. That affected the sales of other types of solar technologies as well.

So if re-tooling the factory and reducing payrolls are necessary to maintain the company’s health and its growth, then they certainly need to be done. But the process comes at the expense of those who were counting on Amonix for more, not fewer, jobs.

Photo courtesy of Amonix

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SuVolta gets $17.6M to make power-sipping chips

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:21:37 +0000

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thought SuVolta is a great example of the future of chip tech. Bright Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, August Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Northgate Capital and DAG Ventures all have contributed to a $17.6 million funding round in the company, which doesn’t exactly design chips but has come up with a novel way to design transistors in a way that makes them use less power.

Chips made using its technique have recently run at full speed but consumed half the power of their counterparts that use traditional transistors. This isn’t just a concern of a crazy startup; Intel recently unveiled a new process technology using 3-D transistors that is designed to save on power by helping chips continue to get smaller.

However, SuVolta’s process is pretty sweet because it uses the existing manufacturing tools already in place at the multi-billion semiconductor manufacturing plants, and because it should continue to work as designers shrink their chips. SuVolta also licenses some IP that gives designers a way to tweak their circuits to optimize the efficacy of the power-saving transistors.

It’s also designed to work best for systems on a chip, which are clusters of different processors integrated on one piece of silicon. In PCs and servers, a single or multi-core CPU was the ideal design choice, but for mobile devices and consumer products, integrating a bunch of different types of cores on a single chip has won out because it saves on space and power. This is why I listed SuVolta one of the three startups that showcase the future of chips.

And saving on space and power is the name of the game as devices go mobile and energy becomes a huge issue, either because of battery life or because power generation has become such a limiting factor in the data center. In fact, many of the chip companies that have managed to raise money in the last two or three years are working to reduce power either through some new process or through using new architectures to perform work more efficiently. Companies such as Adapteva, which is using a different architecture to deliver performance with less power in supercomputers and phones; Calxeda, which is trying to use ARM-based chips for low-power servers; and Lyric Semiconductor, which is focused on a new type of computing, all have raised money in the last few years.

But to show how rare such capital-intensive chip deals are, SuVolta pulled together this infographic to drive it home. As a chip reporter who once covered the bubble years when chip startups were a dime a dozen, I live this shrinkage, because there are fewer pitches and fun stories to write, but this makes it easy for everyone to see what’s going on.

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