Using LEDs as light sources in vegetable gardening is a new business opportunity in Japan, according to a recent Sankei Biz report. Large Japanese real estate developers, consumer electronics manufacturers, and architecture firms are utilizing their advantages to quickly set up their business models in this emerging market.

According to the reports from Sankei Biz, using the LEDs as light source for cultivating vegetables becomes a great commercial opportunity in Japan. The real estate industry, household appliances industry and construction industry are all take their own advantages to occupy the market share. Asahi Kasei Homes, a large-scale developer in Japan, intend to bring the device housing cultivation of vegetables to the market next year at the earliest. Another big builders Obayashi, is also preparing to enter the business areas engaged in agricultural production, and Nishimatsu ...

According to reports, Apple recently applied a trademark “iWatch” in Japan after having applied the same trademark in Russian regions. According to one patent official familiar with the situation, Apple submitted the iWatch trademark application on June 3, but Japan Patent Office website chose to release the patent on June 27. Just days before Apple kicked off its 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference, CEO Tim Cook spoke to Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at AllThingsD’s D11 Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., where he discussed A...

Google glasses have caused a series of disputes concerning personal privacy since they came out. The reason is the Google glasses equipped with cameras enable users easily record what they saw, while without neither video warning lights nor shutter sound. Many people worry that they will be getting photographed. In order to meet the new requirements of protecting personal privacy, Japanese Institute of Informatics developed a new technology. As long as you wear the glasses releasing a special light, you can prevent your face from being recognized by the camera. After the relea...

Spiritual civilization is based on the material, and the entertainment industry in Japan can be traced back to 1920’s. In Japan, the entertainment industry has a very long history; it occupies a huge domestic market and develops steadily. In addition, since streets in Japan are narrow, various entertainment venues along the streets on both sides are dizzying. Spark LED Street Light enjoys great popularity among entertainment in Japan with its high quality and excellent performance. As the photo shows to us, the perfect lighting effect also reflects the development of...

New Japan Radio Co., Ltd. (New JRC) recently has released its new product NJL5303R, a reflective optical sensor combining a green LED and photo transistor into a small COB package which is very applicable to pulse detection. Many pulse testing equipments on the now market, utilize near infrared light to do blood flow detection. The NJL5303R adopts green light with 570nm emission wave length well-suitable for pulse detection. The reflection factor of green light provides higher sensitive pulse detection than the detection employing near infrared light. The NJL...

At SID 2013, an academic conference on display technologies (lecture number: P.140L), Japan Broadcasting Corp (NHK) and Nippon Shokubai Co Ltd announced that they thoroughly improved the oxygen and moisture resistances of their OLED device. In addition, they utilized the new technology to demonstrate a display by playing a press preview of Open House 2013 May 28, 2013. As the development of flexible OLED displays and OLED lighting devices being advanced, their durabilities remain a big problem for commercialization. To solve this problem, the barrier capab...

Earlier in May, Panasonic Corp announced that it has developed a white OLED with the world's highest luminous efficiency of 114 lm/W. Improvements in the efficiency of this OLED device were due to  the company's focus on optimizing light extraction technology for an all-phosphorescent white OLED.  As a reminder, Panasonic Idemitsu OLED Lighting, a joint venture of Panasonic and Idemitsu, began volume production of OLED lighting panels in October 2012.  The partnership was established back in 2011,with an initial investment of $182 M...

Panasonic Corporation has developed a white OLED with the world's highest luminous efficiency*1 of 114 lm/W (light-emitting area of 1 cm²). In addition, a luminous efficiency of 110 lm/W has also been achieved with a device with a larger emitting area of 25 cm². In order to achieve such a level of high efficiency with the OLED, the company focused on "light extraction technology" and the "all phosphorescent white OLED technology" (technology for the multilayering of the organic emitting layer). OLEDs are capable of emitting any co...

Ecomaa Lighting’s PAR 30 and PAR 38 which are hot seller in Europe and United States had passed the "Electrical Appliance and Material Safety Law of Japan (DENAE) PSE (Product Safety of Electrical Appliance & Materials) certification. The PAR30 and PAR38 series which had passed the PSE certification with exclusive active fan cooling technology, high stability power supply design and UL94V0 anti-fire material, a reflection for high-power LED lighting of combination between integration, application and design. And also approved b...

Recently, LED street lighting project completed by Kingsun and Yamada Denki lit up officially in Gunma Prefecture, Japan. The project includes seven roads'LED street lights retrofit and is the first time to apply LED street lighting - in wide range in Japan. It's learned that the demonstration project has strictly demand in lights quality, technology, and stability. It adopts Kingsun star products—Apollo series LED street lights with advantages such as accurate light distribution, modular heat radiation structure, flexible drive configuration. The...

Verbatim’s VxRGB Vivid Vision™ directional lamp targets applications that demand highest light quality Verbatim announces the commercial release of Vivid Vision™, a directional LED lamp using VxRGB® technology developed by Verbatim’s parent company, Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation. Vivid Vision ensures that colours and fine details of objects are rendered accurately through a unique combination of red, green and blue phosphors applied to a violet, rather than blue, LED die. This type of LED lighting is particularly effective in ...

Panasonic Corp of Osaka, Japan has developed a GaN-based power transistor with a blocking voltage of 600V that enables stable switching operations. Shipment of evaluation samples began in March. The firm claims that its design will for the first time ensure ‘failure-free operation’ by 600V GaN power transistors. The GaN transistors, housed in a small-size package, are also said to contribute to saving energy in a variety of power switching systems for both industrial and consumer applications. The new GaN transistor has the following three key technic...

On March 19, 2013, Nichia has filed a patent infringement lawsuit in Tokyo District Court to enjoin Tsannkuen Japan (Sankun Nihon Denki Kabushiki Kaisha, hereinafter “Tsann Kuen”), a subsidiary of a Taiwanese company, from infringing Nichia’s patent (No. 2780618, or “patent No. 618”) and to claim damages for the infringement with regard to LED desk lamps (product number TF-A321) manufactured by Tsann Kuen. Patent No. 618 relates to the production of blue LED chips. Blue LED chips are incorporated in white LED products us...

SWITCH® Lighting has signed a partnership agreement with Canon Marketing Japan that enables Canon to be the lead import, distribution and sales partner to SWITCH in Japan. "Japan is currently the largest LED market in the world and we are proud to work with Canon Marketing Japan to bring our products to market there,” said Bill Lenihan, Executive Vice President, International. “Japanese consumers and businesses are very energy conscious, quality-oriented, and technology-focused, which is a great fit with our product line. This rela...

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation  announced that it will set up a 4-billion-yen new engineering facility in Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture to strengthen its engineering framework as part of expanding the company's infrastructure-system business in fields including public projects, power generation and rolling stock. The new facility is expected to start operating in April 2014. The company expects to expand its infrastructure-system businesses over the medium to long term, especially in view of increasing demand for energy infrastructure. The new facility will help to increa...

Toshiba has developed a new AC/DC offline LED controller IC with a single converter PFC*1 for LED lighting and lighting equipment. The samples are currently available and the company will move to commercialization in July. The new product is an isolated flyback LED power controller that was developed to meet demanding design criteria: support for triac dimming; high PFC and fewer external parts by achieving active PFC with a single converter; and no use of opto-couplers and detectors for average LED current control of the second side of the transformer. Th...

Toshiba Corp and Toshiba Lighting & Technology Corp exhibited a see-through OLED lighting panel and an OLED lighting panel supporting wireless power transmission at Lighting Fair 2013, from March 5 to 8, 2013, in Tokyo. 'Window lamp' that does not waste light In general, see-through OLED panels look transparent when they are off because transparent electrodes are used for both of their positive and negative electrodes. There are many OLED panels that become transparent when they are off. But Toshiba's see-through OLED panel has a d...

Hitachi Research Laboratory (HRL) of Hitachi Ltd exhibited a prototype of an OLED lighting panel made by using a coating process at Lighting Fair 2013 from March 3 to 8, 2013, in Tokyo.   For the panel, HRL used the "spontaneous multilayer light-emitting layer formation material," which enables to make an OLED lighting panel just by applying HRL's own red (R), green (G) and blue (B) light-emitting materials once. In general, white OLED lighting panels made by using a coating process are made by applying RGB light-emitting material...

Sharp has announced to add a 100W COB LED, known as GW7GAL50SGC LED to its Zenigata family. The new LED will output 14,000 lm, and achieve efficacy of 143 lm/W for SSL lighting applications such as street lights and high-bay lighting. Compared to the existing family members, the new LED will be larger and also be hexagonal in shape, whereas the existing Zenigata products are rectangular. The 50W Mega Zenigata LEDs measure 20×24 mm. The new 100W device is 86.8 mm measured from one point of the hexagon to the opposite point, and 75 mm measu...

Japanese Chemical engineering firm Showa Denko K.K. has cooperated with Masayoshi Shigyo, a professor at Yamaguchi University’s Faculty of Agriculture, to develop new LED lighting technology to spur plant growth in factory controlled conditions, by changing the blue-red ratio through each stage of a plant's development. The technology shortens the growth period of leaf lettuce, for example, to two weeks from three weeks using conventional methods. With growing corporate interest in the vegetable factory business, Showa Denko said the new technique offers si...

IDEC Corp has utilized blue LED elements and yellow fluorescent materials to develop pseudo white LED modules. Under IDEC’s new method, an LED device can be packaged just by covering it with a gel-like silicon resin sheet containing a fluorescent material and heating it. Compared with a conventional method that packages an LED device by inpouring liquid resin, the new method can reduce the time used for packaging process to 1/9. With the conventional method, a "dam" is formed around an LED device on the substrate to keep the resin. Then, t...

Intematix Corporation, an innovator of patented phosphors and phosphor components for high-quality LED lighting, provided an update on its patent infringement litigation in South Korea with Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation.

Recently, at Lighting Japan 2013, Panasonic Idemitsu OLED Lighting (PIOL) Co Ltd exhibited OLED lighting panels developed for residences. The company showed a panel that looks like shoji (paper screen) in a Japanese room, a panel designed for wash stands, etc. It plans to release the panels in the spring of 2013. Meanwhile, it announced its line of products scheduled to be launched by fiscal 2018.   The exhibited OLED panels were the "100 x 100" series, a 10 x 10cm OLED lighting panel that PIOL released in November 2012, and the "...

Sharp has released new 17-mm chip-on-board (COB) Mega Zenigata LEDs that are come in 15W, 25W, 35W and 50W versions, and have the same footprint as previous versions of Zenigata LEDs . The offer luminous efficacy of up to 108 lm/W. Sharp's GW6DxxxxNFC LEDs come in 2,700K, 3,000K, 3,500K, 4,000K, 5,000K, and 6,000K color temperatures with a CRI of 80 or more depending on the performance class. The 50W version of the LEDs have an output of 4780 lm with a typical drive current of 950 mA. However, the design apparently allows users to can...

Japanese companies from Tamura Corp and Koha Co Ltd have created a white LED using gallium oxide (β-type Ga2O3) and exhibited it at Lighting Japan 2013 from Jan 16 to 18, 2013. The LED consists of a blue LED chip made on a β-type Ga2O3 substrate by using GaN-based semiconductor and  a fluorescent material. Compared with a case where a common blue LED chip formed on a sapphire substrate is used, the new LED realizes a higher optical output. At the show, Tamura and Koha showcased two kinds of white LEDs that use 0.3 x 0.3mm and 2 x 2mm...

Japan's LED lighting market is expected to account for around 40% of the global LED lighting market from 2012-2013 with penetration rate expected to exceed the global penetration rate, according to Toshiba Lightech. Furthermore, thanks to rapid decreases in price and market growth in Europe, the US, and China, the CAGR of the global LED lighting market from 2010-2020 to reach 31%, Toshiba Lightech adds. According to president and CEO of Toshiba Lightech, Tooru Shibuya, the firm introduced LED light bulbs in 2009, and in 2011, the LED light bulb ...

Japanese researchers Akinori Koukitu and Yoshinao Kumagai, who are professor and associate professor, respectively, at the Division of Applied Chemistry, the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT), and researchers of Tokuyama Corp. , have made breakthroughs on a deep ultraviolet LED that has the world's highest levels of output characteristics. With a forward current of 150mA, its output and external quantum efficiency are 20mW and 3.0%, respectively. There were two problems in the development of the deep ultraviolet LED: developing a high...

A Japanese research team has announced on January 10 that it developed a new efficiently deep ultraviolet sterilization LED lamp, featuring small volume, electricity saving, environmentally and long lasting ,compared to traditional low pressure mercury lamp. Currently, low pressure mercury lamps are widely used in medical and food application. Because of the environmental harm caused by mercury, researchers are seeking for substitutes. Deep UV is an ultraviolet ray that has short wavelength with high efficient of killing bacteria. And the substrate crystallization has influ...

At CES 2013, Panasonic has exhibited a 56-inch 4k OLED display. The company applied its own printing process to the display and cooperated with Sony in the development of the display's oxide semiconductor. Panasonic President Kazuhiro Tsuga stressed the large size, vivid color and slimness of the display in a keynote speech, however, the company has not disclosed when to mass-produce the display or its expected price....