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Sumitomo Chemical to Get 20% Stake in Quantom Leap Packaging |
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Commentary & Perspective...
SSL Industry Leaders Featured on PBS' Famed "NewsHour"November 15, 2005...Let's hear it for online archiving of streaming video and dialog transcripts. If you missed seeing the Nov. 10th broadcast of a segment on the USA's famed Nightly NewsHour with Jim Lehrer over the PBS (Public Broadcasting Systems) network titled "Changing Lightbulbs: New Lightbulbs Tap into Old Technology," you can now catch it on their web site. Because of its importance to their viewers and the high interest level, PBS stations nationwide have posted and highlighted reruns of the segment. Here's the link to accessing the rerun and transcript, compliments of KERA in Texas. PBS's NewsHour Science Unit took an historic hook for this piece, fortifying our industry's time-honored "35 year overnight success" lament. The tease for the impressively long eight minute piece reads, "A 35-year-old technology -- light emitting diodes or LEDs -- is getting a new life these days as a potential breakthrough for an even older technology -- the light bulb. Spencer Michaels of the Science Unit provides a report." While they didn't actually differentiate between conventional (old fashioned, relatively simple to make) LEDs and today's MOCVD-based advanced, or HB-LEDs per se, which we champion in these pages, producer/reporter Spencer Michaels and his California-based PBS crew obviously did a great job. The segment reflects top caliber camera work and reporting, as one would expect from PBS. To follow is my detailed review of the content and script. Why the dissection? Because I've produced quite a bit of television myself, and because I highly recommend that advanced LED catalysts worldwide (all of whom are readers/viewers of CS Online and SSLighting Net) take special note of how to help put such a piece together for other broadcast outlets in the many countries our CS and SSL industries serve. The better we fashion "The Message" with reasonable accuracy and the more effectively we get it disseminated to the outside world, the faster our industries advanced LEDs will be accepted as not only replacements for mainstream traditional light sources, but as a totally new approach to lighting altogether. I strongly advise marketing departments capture and store this online content for future reference, in case it rotates off PBS' archives. It should be shown at every corporate marketing conclave. This is precisely the type show we've been lobbying the mainstream press to produce, a mission highlighted at our original BLUE 2003 event in Dallas (note especially Pioneer Awards Page). Sometimes it takes a few years to get the press to wake up to something really important. The Nov. 10, 2005 PBS science segment was totally shot in California in August of this year, and it featured some of our industry's most famed "stars," most of whom reside there. The PBS video segment also prompted a one hour NPR radio "Forum" on the topic in August, a replay of which can be accessed via this KQED link. The Nov. 10th PBS NewsHour segment appropriately starts with an attractive female, Jennifer Panko, who reps Color Kinetics in the San Francisco area. Jennifer shows vividly what one of today's typical high end LED-based lighting systems actually looks like. It's always smart to start with a pretty, smart female! It's also smart to show the finished applications upfront. The piece features some excellent footage of all sorts of applications throughout the segment. Then they bring on a cadre of my favorite industry heroes and CS industry honored
pioneers: George Craford, Steve DenBaars, Shuji Nakamura, and Bob Steele. Cree
got some great play in the piece too, featuring Chris James, Cree's new VP of
Marketing in Durham. He was out at Cree Lighting in Santa Barbara for the taping.
I don't know Chris personally as yet, as I do the others, but he did an excellent
job making the point that a $2 Edison bulb seems cheap at first metric, but
because of the power efficiency and long life, the $30 LED bulb wins in the
longrun, with the prices promising to improve along with our tech advances.
Chris also cleverly wore a Cree shirt and the camera picked up the Cree logo
perfectly.(Hint to others: when out on the road or on camera, don the school
colors!) No wonder they made him a VP of marketing! The interviews began with George Craford, Lumileds guru emeritus who pretty much started this whole move toward high brightness LEDs back when he was originally at Hewlett Packard, one of Lumileds' original parents. George underscored for PBS the energy saving aspect of our science and art. He showed Spencer Michaels what the SSL industry is doing to help solve the worldwide energy crisis. According to the transcript, "Craford says a switch to energy-saving LEDs could sharply reduce national energy consumption and save $40 billion a year." A compelling argument to why we should all help wean our countries off an oil-based economy. The segment next showed Steve DenBaars and Shuji Nakamura at UCSB where Steve used the old "cookie baking" analogy of how you make today's advanced LEDs, which everyone can grasp. I often told outsiders that a MOCVD platform was like a "Mrs. Fields Cookies" oven. Pure production, accommodating lots of different varieties of cookies. With chocolate chips, or without... whatever your desired recipe. Between the UCSB gang, George, and Chris James, the main points on how to make advanced LEDs and why they're so terrific appeared to get across. The only thing I wished they'd done better would have been to identify who Shuji Nakamura was when he first appeared on camera. They let Steve do all the talking due to Shuji's heavy Japanese accent (although we, his friends, have no problem understanding him) and the viewer is left to simply wonder who the handsome dude on Steve's left is who's doing all the nodding. I felt that not ID-ing Shuji upfront as the blue LED breakthrough artist was an editing oversight. As they moved on to Robert V. Steele, our industry's foremost market researcher on the subject of HB LEDs and GaN... who did a great job on this PBS project. Most of Spencer's background briefing was done thanks to Bob. On camera, he got the interview down to the needed metrics and the real excitement. Bob's latest numbers are what the entire industry relies on. If you're spewing HB LED facts, spew these... Strategies Unlimited's most recent forecast (and don't forget to credit the source: Strategies Unlimited and forecaster Robert V. Steele. He works hard for his numbers!) "The HB LED market was $3.7 billion in 2004 and is forecast to grow to nearly $7 billion by 2009. The use of HB LEDs for lighting applications will be the fastest growing segment, and is forecast to reach $850 million in 2009." But there's more, some of which the PBS spot didn't capture. It would be a misnomer to think that the SSL industry is only out to replace the Edison bulb with a more energy-efficient and cost-effective alternative. The opportunity goes way beyond that mere challenge, which Bob Steele is a master at explaining... when allowed to get his whole point across. It's not just about lightbulbs, it's about how we're going to completely change lighting as we've known it. If PBS had captured the whole of the story that Bob Steele had to tell (which actually ends with reproducing a Maui sunset in your living room), they'd have divulged that the SSL industry is headed toward what I'll call a newfound flexibility of individual choice. TIR's Lexel technology hints at the direction we're headed. Lexel allows lighting system designers the ability to both vary the color temperature of a white light source as well as dim it. According to Bob Steele, "This technology (Lexel) appears to be the first of its kind to combine all of these features into a single source. The initial version of the Lexel produces 1,000 lumens of white light with an input power of 30 W. The CCT (color temperature) is continuously tunable over a range of 2,200 K to 6,000 K, and the unit is fully dimmable with standard controls." Not that PBS would air those facts and metrics. If the did, their viewers eyes would quickly glaze over. But Lexel technology appears to be a reasonable indicator of where the SSL industry is likely headed. And once we learn how to use integrated solutions like TIR's, could a holodeck like those seen on the Star Ship Enterprise be far off? We're not going to just replace traditional lighting, we're going to revolutionize it. If the PBS segment was allowed to run to 10 minutes, I bet our guys would have been able to get that point across. If you have news or
views to share about the compound semiconductor, LED or solid
state lighting industries |
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