Since the Austrian sensing company AMS won the bid of Osram in December 2019, it has been a long journey for it to complete the acquisition of the German company. Finally, on July 6, AMS announced that it has received unconditional regulatory approval from the EU commission for the acquisition of Osram and is going to close the takeover on July 9, 2020. As the acquisition announced last year, it was stated that the merger would be subject to antitrust and foreign trade approvals by the EU. In the press release of the EU Commission, the Commission concluded that ...

For LED industry players in Taiwan who have been facing stiff competition from China’s supply chain and South Korea’s monopoly on OLED technologies, creating new business opportunities in Mini LED and Micro LED could be a solution. However, Chinese companies are also rushing into the Mini LED and Micro LED markets with recognition of the growth potential there. At the moment when Micro LED has yet to reach technological maturity, and Mini LED sets to enter a phase of explosive market growth. What are the roles of Chinese companies in the L...

Many major trade fairs and exhibitions for 2020 have been postponed or cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, worldwide companies operating in different industries have delayed unveiling their new technologies. However, Micro LED technology developers may have a chance to achieve technological breakthroughs during this time of crisis because of opportunities that lie within this field of innovative display solutions. The first half of 2020 also saw noteworthy activities and events related to the R&D of Micro LED. (Image: AUO) The COVID-19 ...

LeddarTech announced the acquisition of sensor fusion and perception software company VayaVision. Through integration of VayaVision technologies, LeddarTech aims to accelerate time-to-market and reduce customer development costs and risks with a sensor fusion and perception stack that scales from a single sensor to multiple sensor combinations. The Israel-based company, VayaVision, was founded in 2016 by Dr. Nehmadi Youval and Ronny Cohen with expertise in sensor fusion and perception, providing autonomy solutions in the automotive industry addressing use cases from L...

As Micro LED is yet to enter commercialization due to layers of technical difficulties and exorbitant cost, Mini LED has already been successfully incorporated into the application of commercial operation, and has made its presence in the application field of high-end display such as commercial and gaming monitors, including the Mini LED gaming notebook of MSI, as well as the gaming monitors of Asus, Acer, and Lenovo. Now, the industry is anticipating Apple to release multiple iPads and MacBooks adopted with Mini LED backlight technology between 2H20 and 2021 tha...

Velodyne Lidar announced that it has raised US$150 million in a reverse takeover and will be combining with Graf Industrial to go public in the third quarter of the year. It is expected that Velodyne will be listed on the NYSE under the symbol of VLDR. Pursuant to the business combination, Graf will acquire Velodyne through a reverse merger in which Velodyne is ascribed an enterprise value of approximately US$1.6 billion and equity value of approximately US$1.8 billion. Following the transaction and after payment of transaction expenses, Velodyne is expected to...

The arrival of Mini LED in the latest competition of display technology has not only laid down the foundation for the next generation of Micro LED display technology, but also became the new opportunity in breaking through the predicament for the LED industry and panel manufacturers. As invigorated by the aggressive involvement from major brands including Apple, multiple Mini LED backlight products and the application of RGB self-luminous displays are now on the verge of commencement, and the new products for the relevant application are expected to enter substantially i...

Mini LED and Micro LED, the novel display technologies based on LED, have lit up the industry which long suffered from low price competition. As worldwide companies and research institutes pouring resources into technology development in the past years and building up partnerships to formulate new ecosystem, several Micro and Mini LED achievements were revealed. Display products using Mini LED backlight are launched and Micro LED prototypes also continue to achieve breakthroughs. (Image: Pixabay) Apple’s rumor of launching Mini LED backlight techn...

Samsung announced that its outdoor LED products were exclusively used to build SoFi Stadium’s 70,000 square-foot (6503 square meters) dual-sided center-hung videoboard and five levels of fascia display which will be used to elevate the fan experience to unparalleled heights. The state-of-the-art videoboard not only features the most LEDs ever used in a sports or entertainment venue, but also has the first and only 4K end-to-end video production in a stadium. The videoboard used nearly 80 million pixels, achieving the largest LED content playback system ever deployed....

Velodyne Lidar announced two new business partners and is going to leverage its LiDAR sensing technologies for people flow monitoring and automation at one of the busiest seaport. Velodyne signed a multi-year partnership agreement with Outsight, who offers solutions of Smart Cities monitoring. Outsight uses Velodyne Lidar sensing technology in its 3D Semantic Camera system that helps businesses and governments improve the analysis and management of people flow and assets in large crowded environments. LiDAR sensors enable 3D capture and tracking of people and object...

The Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) and the International Ultraviolet Association (IUVA) have partnered to develop American National Standards for the measurement and characterization of UV-C device performance in disinfection. Through this partnership IES and IUVA aim to cooperatively promote awareness of and improve the application of UV disinfection technology in the healthcare system by establish measuring standard for UV disinfecting products including light sources of UV lamps and UV LEDs. (Image: Pixabay) Since UVC radiation...

Via photoplethysmography (PPG), red light and infrared LEDs can receive date from the environment and measure biometric data including heart rate, blood oxygen, blood pressure and blood sugar level. Adopting the sensing components to wearable devices enables a wider range of applications with many leading brands working on launching related products. (Image: Pixabay) A patent Apple received earlier this year describes how Apple Watch could analyze composition of water and determine the pH level of user’s sweat through the sensing components like short-wave infrared...

Apple’s rumored Mini LED backlight based iPad Pro is said to use display supplied by LG display and chips from Epistar. The LCD module will be assembled by Taiwan’s TSMT and the whole iPad Pro will be completed by Foxconn, reported TheElec, a Korean media. The report also noted that the 12.9-inch Mini LED iPad Pro is in trial production and is scheduled to launch the earliest in 4Q20. (Image: Pixabay) Since Micro LED technology still encounters manufacture difficulties and can hardly commercialize, the progress of Mini LED beco...

Study Shows the Impacts of Lighting in Our Daily Life Many researches have indicated that lighting plays a critical role for human wellbeing and can significantly affect our productivity. The Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute published a study in 2018*, demonstrating that circadian-effective lighting installed in office buildings can help workers to reduce sleepiness and increase alertness and energy. “Circadian-effective” lighting describes light source delivering effective photic stimulus that suppress melatonin, which often re...

The City of Jersey City in the U.S. is launching the municipal vertical farming program together with vertical farm technology supplier AeroFarms and World Economic Forum. The program is aim to support healthy diet for people living in area and spark awareness. The initiative will establish 10 vertical farms throughout Jersey City located in senior centers, schools, public housing complexes, and municipal buildings. The 10 sites will grow 19,000 pounds of vegetables annually using water mist and minimal electricity. The food will be free to the public. (Image: AeroF...

New display technologies Mini LED and Micro LED are bringing new opportunities to the industry. Many companies are thus trying to develop new strategies and form alliances with the aim to occupy a leading position in the market. Recently, Taiwan-based LED companies Epistar and Lextar announced their integration for leveraging their expertise to accelerate technology development in Mini LED and Micro LED technologies, hoping to win more business opportunities. Apart from LED manufacturers, panel makers have also geared up to push commercialization of the new di...

Signify announced its partnership with the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to support the Smart Street Lighting NY project of the state. The Smart Street Lighting NY program was launched in 2018 with the aim to replace streetlights in New York State. Signify is going to provide its Interact City IoT lighting system to connect LED luminaires and further help cities of the state to reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint. To date, more than 50,000 LED streetlights have been installed or are currently being installed under the program. (Im...

Taiwanese LED chip maker Epistar and Lextar are going to form a new holding company, aiming to intensify its growing momentum in next-gen display technologies Mini LED and Micro LED. LEDinside noticed that Apple, who is reportedly launching Mini LED-based products, could be a nudge that lead to the alliance of Epistar and Lextar. Rumors of Apple to release several Mini LED backlight technology adopted products including a 12.9-inch iPad Pro, a 14.1-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro in 2020 and 2021 have been going on since last year. Epistar, the Taiwan com...

Two Taiwan-based LED companies, Epistar and Lextar, announced yesterday (June 18) that they will jointly set up a new holding company via share conversion. Through the collaboration, the two companies aim to integrate their resource and focus on their expertise to speed Mini LED and Micro LED technology development. For the new holding company, Epistar and Lextar will swap one share for 0.5 and 0.275 shares respectively. The share swap is scheduled to be completed on October 20, 2020. Once the new holding company is listed upon the share swap date, both Epistar a...

Micro LED technology supplier PlayNitride said that it aims to reduce production cost of Micro LED chip by 95% in five years to meet the requirement of mass production and is continue to raise funding. Charles Li, CEO of PlayNitride, noted that the two major keys of Micro LEDs are to make them small and cheap, which is the current challenge for commercialization. In order to achieve the goal, it is critical to connect the supply chain from wafer manufacture, chip process, transfer technology, display module, backplane driver and system tuning. Most of the processes ...

With the impacts of COVID-19 outbreak, several companies across the world including Osram had withdrawn their business outlook or guidance earlier this year. As for new, following reopens in many countries, Osram provided an updated business guidance for its fiscal year 2020, starting October 2019 and ending September 2020. Osram reported on June 17, 2020, that it is expecting an on-year revenue decline of -15 to -19%, comparing to its previous guidance of comparable revenue growth between -3% and +3%. The projected adjusted EBITDA margin went down from 9% to 11% to ...

Signify collaborated with the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) at Boston University in the US on a research that validates the effectiveness of Signify’s UVC light sources on the inactivation of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Since the start of the SARS CoV-2 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Griffiths, Associate Professor of Microbiology at Boston University School of Medicine and his team have been working on developing tools to support scientific advancement in this field. During their research they have t...

Otsaw, the robot manufacturer from Singapore announced that it has launched the world first UVC LED based autonomous robot for disinfection. The robot, named “O-RX,” is created in only eight weeks from conceptualization, design, materials procurement, prototype testing to certification. The UVC LED embedded disinfecting robot also passed safety testing and has been certified by TUV SUD. (Image: Otsaw) Unlike other current UV disinfecting robot using mercury UV lamps, the O-RX utilizes the UVC LED technology that emits only UVC ...

Panasonic Lighting Americas announced a strategic solution partnership with Pointr, a UK-based startup experts in deep location platforms. The new partnership enables an offering of end-to-end connected lighting solutions, paired with real-time location-based services, to address the convergence of physical spaces with the virtual world. The two parties will integrated their expertise in location based services and lighting solutions to provide innovative offering for customers such as digital ceiling embedded with location-based services. The solution aims to improve efficiency,...

Huawei’s subsidiary Hubble recently invested in Vertilite, a semiconductor startup focusing on VCSEL development. The amount of the investment was not revealed. Vertilite has become the VCSEL supply of Huawei after the U.S. banned Lumentum shipment to the China tech giant in May, 2019. Huawei thus turned to Vertilite for the 3D sensing component and further pushed the de-Americanization plan. Hubble is an investment company of Huawei and has invested different China-based semiconductor companies to help strengthening their technology and fortifying i...

Daktronics and Beijing Indigo have partnered for a new freeform LED video display in the location's winter garden atrium. The display forms a curtain across six arc-arranged steel columns to form the largest display in the Beijing region. The display is comprised of freeform stick LED elements featuring 25-mm line spacing and measuring 9 meters high by 52 meters wide. It is a transparent display that faces inward to create an engaging atmosphere for visitors while people outside can see through the display. (Image: Daktronics) "It was challenging to ensure t...

LG Electronics said on June 11 that its LED Cinema Display has been installed in Taiwan’s movie theater. It is the first commercialized LED Cinema Display of LG and the first LED theater display in Taiwan. The display is 14 meters wide and seven meters high, supporting 4K resolution and installed in a 300-seat theater that is operated by Taiwan’s local cinema chain Showtime Cinema. LG also works with audio tech company Dolby Laboratories to add surround sound to the display, offering an advanced experience with its LED Cinema Display. ...

Japan-based medical equipment supplier Nikkiso has collaborated with the University of Miyazaki and announced that its deep UV LED adopted apace disinfecting device can effectively prevent the spread of COVID-19. The two parties conducted trials by exposing SARS-CoV-2 viruses contained liquid under deep UV LED radiation for 30 second and found that virus infectivity decreased by 99.9%. The experiment went on two months and the effectiveness of deep UV LED for preventing COVID-19 infection is confirmed. (Image: Nikkiso) Researchers said that th...

Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation (MCC) and the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) announced that they have won in two patent administrative suits and confirm the validity of a patent (No. ZL201110066517.7) for red phosphor. (image: NIMS) MCC filed the patent infringement litigation with the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court against Shield on January 23, 2015. Another litigation filing with that court was against Intematix, its American parent Intematix Corporation, and Chinese sales agency GrandLux Optoelectronics (collectivel...

LED video display company announces the financial results of its fiscal 4Q20 and 2020 ending May 2. 2020. Daktronics reported fiscal year 2020 net sales of US$608.9 million, operating loss of US$0.2 million and net income of US$0.5 million. This compares to net sales of $569.7 million, operating loss of US$4.7 million, and net loss of US$1.0 million for fiscal 2019. Fiscal 2020 orders were US$620.8 million compared to US$608.9 million for fiscal 2019. For fiscal 4Q20, Daktronics registered net sales of US$126.1 million, operating loss of US$3.5 million, and...