LED prices fall below the sweet spot

LED prices have fallen frequently, but in fact the price declines are good or bad. If the price falls to sweet spots, it may create reversal growth. Analyst Guo Ziling, an analyst from the Institute of Industrial Technology Research (IEK), said that reducing LED production costs has become an important issue for manufacturers, including packaging, heat dissipation, and driver ICs in the back-end segment, and will be three important topics for manufacturers to reduce costs.

Guo Ziling pointed out that in recent years, many large international companies have been cutting into the packaging of the latter stage and looking toward unpackaged products. Whether or not packaging costs can be reduced has become the key to the profitability of manufacturers. In addition, from the perspective of the LED upstream and downstream industry chain, the highest value is not in the light source, but in the back-end lighting, so the big factories are all focused on the back-end layout.

The low price of LED has prompted manufacturers to actively reduce costs. Guo Ziling stated that LED components have the highest proportion of packaging and cooling costs, accounting for more than 60%, which is an important direction for manufacturers to reduce costs. It is estimated that the packaging cost must be reduced by at least 50% by 2016. Helps the rapid development of the LED industry and maintains profitability for manufacturers. In this regard, the listed company Jingdian developed the ELC non-encapsulation technology, only the need for wafers, fluorescent powder and packaging glue, eliminating the need for lead frame, wire and other steps, can be directly applied (SMT), in addition to reducing costs, the product With the advantage of a large luminous angle, there is an opportunity to eliminate the use of secondary optical lenses in the future.

TSMC solid-state lighting is launching PoP without packaging technology, directly flip-chip wafers on the heat-dissipating substrate, omitting the lead frame and wire process, with the advantages of small size and higher luminous flux, suitable for directional light source applications, with easy color mixing And regulate color temperature.

In addition, the driver IC accounts for 20% of the LED cost, which will also be the key to cost reduction. To move towards optoelectronics and adopt a non-isolated architecture will help save costs.