How to reduce the cost of LED chip

As the growth of TV backlighting has slowed down, and the lighting market with cost issues and consumer awareness issues is still open, the LED industry is facing the toughest moments. As the world's largest semiconductor lighting industry, CHINA SSL has gathered almost all the world's semiconductor lighting giants and top experts. It has become an important platform for the exchange of technical information products in the field of international semiconductor lighting. From November 8-10, CHINA SSL2011 was held in Guangzhou. Representatives from many countries and regions in the world gathered together for three days to discuss in depth how the government, industry, and enterprises should think Yes, a lot of positive signals were passed at the meeting, injecting a lot of effort into the industry. “Reducing costs” is also one of the key words of the conference. Representatives from different fields have conducted in-depth discussions on the improvement of production processes at various stages of the industry chain, the application of new technologies, and the modularization of the entire industry chain.

At present, if we want to “winter” and break through the market, how to really reduce costs and how to achieve an increase in lumens per dollar is the most important. At the meeting, international companies such as Philips, GE and Osram all proposed a 10x reduction in 10 years. Fujian Wanbang Optoelectronic Technology Co., Ltd. launched 8W 810 lumens, and the entire lamp retail price reached 39.8 yuan, which became a LED bulb. The hot point of discussion in the industry, in a certain sense, has stimulated the nerves that the industry has been plagued by high costs. According to the analysis of the current lighting market development, it is unlikely that LED will replace the cheaper traditional light source in recent years, mainly because the purchase cost is still too high. GE believes that the price of driving personal consumption is about 10 US dollars, and there is still some distance. Of the various factors that reduce costs, the chip is obviously the most important. Although the price of chips has gone down by 30%-40% with the increase of luminous efficiency and the expansion of production capacity this year, there is still a large space requirement. Work hard.

Improve light efficiency and develop to large size

The chip has the largest share in LED lighting and is a technical monopoly. Whether it is the improvement of light efficiency or the development of scale, the costs can be greatly reduced, and the cost performance of LED lighting products can be effectively improved. MichaEL Holt, CEO of Philips Lighting, stated at the closing ceremony of the conference that the performance of Philips products in 2020 will reach 200 lumens per watt. He also stated that "a larger chip can achieve higher efficiency, but we have no way to solve the high current. If we can maintain high current and high efficiency, we can achieve our goal."

In order to increase production efficiency, more and more LED chip plants have accelerated the expansion of 4 or even 6-inch chip capacity. South Korea's Samsung has been mass-produced with 4 units of LED in 2010, and Philips Lumileds announced that it will mass-produce 6-inch LED chips at the end of 2010. Taiwan's Jingdian, and AUO's Dachang Longda, also announced that they will further expand their 4-inch chip production capacity in 2011. At the meeting, Mr. Michael Heuken, Vice President of R&D at Astorware Research, said in a reporter's question, “Large-sized substrates are a development trend, and 4-inch, 6-inch and 8-inch substrates are an inevitable trend. The new MOCVD equipment introduced on November 8th - 19x4 inch new CRIUS II-XL reactor, can choose to use wafers of any size from 2 inches to 8 inches, with a simple replacement of the graphite plate in hardware , No other hardware or process adjustments are required."

In addition, many companies believe that the array approach and the sorting-free approach can all reduce chip costs to some extent. The mature low-power chips are easy to solve because of heat dissipation problems and the price is low, which has become the current choice for many companies to reduce product costs.

High-voltage LED will become the mainstream of the future

From the first half of 2010, Cree, Nichia, and Lumileds announced the development of HV LED (high voltage) chips. In October of the same year, Epistar introduced blue 1W, 50V, 20mA chips and high-bright red 0.7W, 35V, and 20mA chips. . The HV LED chip has advantages such as low packaging cost, high warm white light efficiency, high driving power efficiency, and low line loss. At the meeting, most experts believe that the HV LED will become the mainstream in the future. In addition to wafers capable of mastering high-voltage LED chip technology and mass production, domestic crystal, Diyuan, Jinke, etc. also developed high-voltage chips on the original chip structure and achieved mass production. According to Diyuan Optoelectronics, the self-developed HVLED has a mass production efficiency of 115 lm/W, a theoretical luminous efficiency of 130 lm/W, and a luminous efficiency of about 10%, and lasts for 1,000 hours. Both are less than 2%.

Jingyuan Optoelectronics introduced its HVLED development at CHINASSL2011H. Before they used a lot of small chips to meet the demand of high voltage, but now they have developed a new chip-on-chip technology that can meet high voltage with a single chip. The cost of arranging them together with smaller chips can help customers to reduce costs to a great extent.

Expand production capacity to achieve economies of scale

From the aspect of enterprises, to reduce the cost of chips, an important trend is based on the integration of the value chain and the overall scale of the company's expansion of production capacity. "The problem of overcapacity that has emerged this year has actually lowered the cost objectively!" said Michael Holt, CEO of Philips Lighting. Some experts predict that chip prices will continue to decline in the future, but it will not be as large as this year or even more than 50% in individual declines. It is believed that as the entire upstream technology continues to increase, its cost will still be greater through technological improvements. Falling space.

However, Mike Watson, senior director of market and product applications at Cree, has another insight. In the closing ceremony of CHINASSL2011, he thought that only the cost reduction of 10 times and the improvement of light efficiency were wrong, and the focus should be The question of the effect of light efficiency on everyone's acceptance has to take into account commercial issues. Solid-state lighting actually touches many industries. We must pay attention to the difference of business models rather than the differentiation of technologies or light effects. We must tell our end-users the value and then come up with a model that we have adopted. There will be revenue. With the benefits, the development of technology will in turn drive competition, and competition will bring about further cost reductions. Only in this way can we win, and this model can achieve 10 times cost reduction.