LED Lighting Industry Expects a Bright Future

With a recent technological breakthrough in gallium-nitride (GaN) light-emitting diode (LED) materials and the growing maturity of the blue- and green-light LED production process, optoelectronic semiconductors are poised to bring about a revolutionary change in the world lighting industry.

LED and lighting manufacturers expect LED lamps to replace incandescent and fluorescent lamps over time, in conformity with the worldwide trend toward energy conservation and pollution control. The global market for general-purpose LED lamps is expected to surge to around US$840 million in 2008, according to Communications Industry Researchers (CIR), a U.S. research organization, and will continue to grow rapidly after that.

The Photonics Industry & Technology Development Association (PIDA), a Taiwanese government-backed industry think-tank, notes that LED lamps have been developed for both general and special lighting purposes. The core LED products in the general-lighting category are white-light diodes, while the special-lighting category is made up of colored diodes for display-panel backlight modules, traffic lighting, automotive lamps, warning lamps, emergency lamps, and other purposes.





Robert Su, a PIDA analyst who tracks the optoelectronics/semiconductor industry, says that LEDs have a bright future but that there is a long way to go before they will become as attractive as traditional incandescent and fluorescent lamps in terms of their cost/brightness combination. "We need more research into technologies that can turn LED lamps into day-to-day lighting sources," he stresses. Current difficulties faced by the industry include inadequate brightness, high production costs, and a lack of standards.



Conservation and Other Advantages



LEDs offer many advantages, including power conservation, and leading world economies (China included) have given top priority to the development of semiconductor lighting as part of their power-conservation programs. Citing a study released by the Chinese authorities, Su reports that in 2010 LED lamps are expected to save as much as 107.5 billion kilowatts of electricity in China alone, once a 10 billion renminbi (RMB; US$1.2 billion at US$1:RMB8.27) program to foster the semiconductor-lighting industry in major cities there is completed.

In Xiamen City, in the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian, a project to beautify an offshore islet with semiconductor lighting was kicked off last April, and is scheduled for completion in 2007. Part of the project entails the standardization of such lighting equipment.

Chinese authorities say that their semiconductor-lighting programs are far more valuable in terms of energy consumption (and its conservation) than the Three Gorges Hydroelectric Power Plant, which will turn out 85.6 billion kilowatts of electricity a year and is costing at least 300 billion renminbi to build.

Today's traditional electric lights are energy guzzlers. In 2002, in the U.S. incandescent and fluorescent lamps consumed 83% of all power used for lighting purposes. In Japan, lighting accounts for 15.5% of all household-electricity consumption.

In mainland China, lighting used 229.2 billion kilowatts of electricity in 2003, accounting for about 12% of all power generated there. In 2010, mainland authorities predict, their lighting needs will gobble up 322.5 billion kilowatts of electricity. This consumption is contributing to the growing severity of power shortages in the mainland.

This situation makes the switch to more efficient types of lighting-notably LEDs-all the more urgent. And this is good news for the LED manufacturers of the world.