The LED industry is a semiconductor-related high-tech industry. Looking at today's high-tech industries, especially semiconductor-related high-tech industries, such as integrated circuits, communications, lasers, etc., upstream chips are often the key to the entire industry. This key role is not only reflected in the performance and price of upstream chips, but also in the performance and price of midstream and downstream products. It is also reflected in the fact that chip suppliers often control the patents and standards of the entire industry. The performance of LED lighting chips largely determines the performance of the entire product.
The main upstream technologies of the LED industry chain include substrate design, epitaxial wafer generation, and finally chip formation. According to the different requirements of luminous efficiency, it can be divided into high power chips and low power chips. In terms of applications, low-power chips are mainly used in mobile phones, notebook computers and TV indicators, etc., where the requirements for luminous efficiency are not very high, and high-power chips are mainly used in fields where the market prospects are good for street lighting.
LED street lights into mainstream applications
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The street light is a very special luminaire, not only to solve its uniformity, but also to solve its brightness problem. There is a certain requirement for the light distribution of the street lamp, that is, the coverage area is large enough, and the light can be elongated in the left and right direction. If the light distribution does not meet the requirements, it will cause the street lamp to be bright, and the street lamp and the street lamp are dark, like the pattern on the zebra body, so some people describe the LED street lamp as the 'zebra line'. If the efficacy of the chip can not reach 100lm / W or more, the stability and reliability of the chip itself is not good, even if the heat dissipation is good, the optical design is excellent, it is difficult to meet the lighting requirements. Therefore, the LED street light of the low-power chip is not far from the energy-saving effect, and the products of various manufacturers cannot be universal with each other. Therefore, the high-power integrated chip will be the mainstream of the future LED street lamp application. Chip-integrated high-power chip—Packages high-brightness LED chiplets on the aluminum substrate with integrated circuit packaging technology, shortening the heat transfer path, and making LED high-power chips with better heat dissipation.
Increased chip companies  Market dawn
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LED industry research institute LEDinside recently released the latest report. As of August 2009, there are 62 LED chip manufacturers in mainland China, which has shown rapid growth in recent years. 1999 was the beginning of the rapid development of China's LED chip companies. In 1998, there were only three related companies in China. In 1999, there were 6 more, and from 1999 to 2009, 2-7 companies entered the LED chip industry every year. .
From the perspective of domestic market revenue, the sales of domestic LED chips last year was 65 million yuan, which greatly exceeded the 10 million yuan in 2003. Among the LED application revenues (RMB 45 billion) in 2008, the largest part was the packaging and chip manufacturing industry, which was 18.5 billion yuan and 1.9 billion yuan respectively. Under the stimulus of demand in downstream applications, many companies are beginning to expand production, and Sanan Optoelectronics has expanded 18 MOCVD equipment to 33 this year. In addition, some companies with relatively mature technology in the field of small chips are also preparing to launch high-power chips. The light efficiency of domestic high-power LED chips is growing faster and faster. In 2005, using the imported chip package, China's best white LEDs achieved 30–35 lm/W at 350 mA, while only 20–25 lm/W was used in domestic chip packages. Now, the packaging of domestic LED chips has reached 80-90lm/W at 350mA.
The company's independent mass production is mainly dependent on imports.
Although China's LED industry is getting stronger and stronger, its high-brightness products still lag behind the world's leading level. Compared with overseas manufacturers, Chinese companies are small-scale, and there is still a huge gap in product quality. Most of the domestic LED chips are used in low-end products, and 85% of high-power chips have to rely on imports. There are not many enterprises that are actually mass-produced in 62 LED chip companies in mainland China, and the epitaxial wafers mainly rely on Taiwan, the United States and other regions to import, and LED chip production is also more concentrated in low-power chips. Domestic LED companies, 8 out of 10 companies using high-power chips are chips produced by foreign companies. About 5 of the 10 companies that use low-power chips are domestic chips. Domestically, Wuhan Diyuan, Guangzhou Jingke, Xi'an Huaxin Lihua and other manufacturers focused on high-power chip production, but from the current situation, high-power chips mainly rely on imports.
High-power chip development has technical difficulties
The low-power chip does not require high material quality for the epitaxial wafer, so it is relatively easy to do. Many domestic LED companies have mastered the low-power chip technology. Since the beginning of this year, domestic enterprises have made relatively obvious progress in technology, and the technology tends to mature. High-power LED chips have high requirements on epitaxial materials. If the material growth quality is not high, the conversion efficiency of the chips will be low and the heat will be high.
In addition to the epitaxial material problem, the main technical difficulties of high-power chips are: secondary optical design, thermal design and power system design. However, the gap between the current domestic level and the international leading technology in the high-power market is shrinking. Taking Sanan Optoelectronics as an example, it is now possible to produce a luminous efficiency of 80 lm/W. The international indicator is that the luminous efficiency is 100 lm/W. Based on this, the level of Sanan Optoelectronics differs from the international level by 2-3 years. In addition, due to the expiration of foreign patents in core infrastructure technology, industry analysts also pointed out that upstream enterprises will also bring benefits such as reduced use costs.
Patent hinders the catch-up of local companies
The key technologies of international LEDs are mainly concentrated on substrate materials, epitaxial material growth, high-power chip manufacturing, and white LED manufacturing. The core patents of these technologies are controlled by several large international companies. Nichia is the company with the largest number of patents and the most influential patent pattern. The mainstream technologies for LED chip substrate manufacturing are sapphire substrate technology and silicon carbide substrate technology, which belong to Japan Nichia Corporation and Cree Company, USA. Most of China's chip manufacturing companies use Japan's Nichia's sapphire substrate technology, but they need to pay a lot of patent fees to Japan's Japan.
The savvy thing about foreign companies is that it encourages domestic companies to use piracy like Microsoft, which will exclude other companies from the market. But in the end, the entire market will be very dependent on them. Now, domestic companies' chips are basically imported. The small chip field has little gap between domestic and foreign countries, and the technology is quite mature. In the two areas of epitaxial wafers and large chips, the gap between the two sides is too great, and it is impossible for the domestic market to catch up in the short term. Even if it catches up, it cannot circumvent its patents. However, as long as the main competitors have paid, everyone is still on the same competitive starting line. All LED chips factories in Taiwan that have been involved in blue and white light have experienced LED litigation in the process of growing up, reached a settlement in the lawsuit, and obtained patent authorization. grow. The best response is to do large-scale at this stage, obtain patent authorization, and at the same time continue to strengthen its own research and development, and improve the bargaining power in patent litigation.
Local high-power lighting chip plans have been blocked or dismantled
Although there are some manufacturers in China that can provide low-power LED chips for display and backlight applications, in the face of huge lighting application market, no one in China can provide high-power LED chips that can be mass-produced. Although some local chip makers are trying to develop high-power LED chips, the R&D plan has been blocked or dismissed:
1. Dalian Luming’s planned loan of 300 million yuan for R&D chips could not be implemented due to the government’s unwillingness to guarantee, resulting in the dismantling of the chip research and development plan, coupled with the second batch of “337†investigations and the global financial crisis. The situation is rather bad and it is no longer able to invest in research and development.
2. After Shanghai Blu-ray has invested in the holding of Rainbow Group, Rainbow Group currently maintains or even negates the large and high-risk chip development plan.
3. The advantage market of Xiamen Sanan lies in the display aspect. Although it has recently intentionally entered the development of high-power lighting chips, under the influence of the financial crisis, this research and development plan has been suspended under the influence of factors such as capital and market positioning.
4. After the second batch of “337†investigations, Hangzhou Silan’s chip research and development plan was severely hindered, and many of its key R&D personnel have flowed to other related companies.
5. Under the pressure of shrinking market and rising costs, Shenzhen Fangda Guoke has abandoned the huge investment in chip research and development, and turned to the packaging and application of the middle and lower reaches.
6, Jiangxi Lianchuang's report has shown that its financial situation is worrying, facing the danger of mergers and acquisitions, it is impossible to invest in chip research and development.
Conclusion
The core issue of the LED lighting industry is not the packaging and application of the middle and lower reaches, but the high-end chips in the upstream. It is conceivable that if China has been missing high-end LED chips in the future, even if the government invests ten times as much as the demonstration project, it will only earn more lucrative profits for foreign chip manufacturers in China. China's domestic packaging and application companies will always Only a meager "hard work" can be obtained, and China's LED industry will surely step into the footsteps of the sad DVD industry.
In addition, if there is no independent LED high-end chip, it is also a heavy blow to the domestic LED public inspection agency. If this is the case, according to the laws of the high-tech industry, the standards of all aspects of the entire industry can only be implemented in accordance with foreign standards, then the testing institutions can only earn a small amount of “testing fees†through the identification of foreign standards organizations, without any The ability to independently establish standards and regulate the market.
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