The world's largest lighting exhibition and LED exhibition - Guangzhou International Lighting Exhibition, opened grandly on June 9, 2014 under the attention of everyone. The reporter visited the exhibition site in person and visited many exhibition halls. The reporter saw that in order to welcome the arrival of the LED explosion period, companies in various fields are working hard to launch their latest products, which is dizzying and bright. At the same time, during the exhibition, some companies also held new product launch conferences to explain various insights into the current market.
In the LED industry, the chip is the core device, which can be said to touch the soul of the entire industry. In order to learn about the latest developments in the chip field, reporters were invited to attend a new product launch conference held by Huacan Optoelectronics on the afternoon of June 10. At this conference, Dr. Liu Rong, President of Huacan Optoelectronics, analyzed the current LED chip technology and market development trends, and also explained Huacan Optoelectronics’ annual strategic plan.
1. LED industry trends and market segment trends
Talking about the overall trend of the LED new product industry, Dr. Liu Rong said that the overall global LED application market is showing a growing trend, mainly due to the explosion of the lighting market.
Display screen
From the above figure, due to the rapid development of the lighting market since 2013, the demand for lighting chips has grown rapidly. It is expected that the demand for chips in the backlight market will also grow rapidly in 2015.
In terms of display screens, indoor displays are developing toward high-definition, and outdoor displays are developing toward surface-mount displays with wide viewing angles and high image quality. At the same time, they are also becoming smaller-pitch and high-definition. This development trend will also drive the rapid increase in demand for LED chips in display applications.
Dr. Liu Rong said that in the future, indoor display screens will develop towards high density, and will pay more attention to the application performance of high density, high scanning, high refresh and high gray scale. The chips used will be optimized for small size, low current driving, high light efficiency, good consistency and high reliability. Outdoor displays will become more surface-mounted, and the display angle and image quality will be further improved. The chips used in such displays will develop in the direction of good light pattern consistency, higher brightness, and better chip weather resistance.
Backlight
In terms of backlight, from a global perspective, the demand for chips for TV backlights is declining due to direct penetration and improvements in LED light efficiency. "The LED backlight market will still be a very important application market for a long time," said Dr. Liu Rong. "At present, the comprehensive strength of mainland China's chip factories and packaging factories is constantly improving, and the backlight market is also shifting significantly to mainland China." This trend is undoubtedly a development opportunity for Chinese chip factories and packaging factories. It also requires backlight chips to continue to be optimized in the direction of smaller, thinner, brighter, wide color gamut, and high reliability.
Lighting
The replacement rate of LED lighting market will increase rapidly in the future. Based on sales estimates, it is estimated that it will reach 58% in 2016 and 78% in 2020. The penetration rate of LED in Europe and the United States will also increase rapidly.
“This is a prediction made by the U.S. Department of Energy last year. By 2016, 58% of the U.S. market will be replaced by LED lights in terms of sales ratio.” When talking about the future LED lighting market, Dr. Liu Rong said: “Because the energy-saving effect of LED lights is very obvious, the next step for countries to promote LED lights is Widespread application is very fast, and Europe is expected to account for more than half of the LED market by 2025. But I think China’s lighting application market is likely to catch up, because of the focus of our industry, there is an obvious trend in the development of global LED technology to large-scale production.”
According to the chart, the proportion of LED lighting products produced by European, American and mainland manufacturers also increased significantly in 2013. Global LED OEMs are also concentrating on the mainland. In 2013, the export proportion of LED lighting products reached 57%. In this regard, Dr. Liu Rong said that the penetration rate of lighting in 2013 was 20%. As the penetration rate accelerates, the demand for chips in the lighting market may grow explosively. The rapid increase in penetration rate is mainly due to the sharp drop in the price of alternative lighting terminal lamps. Alternative lighting is a cost-sensitive market, which focuses on improving the luminous efficiency (lm/W) of the chip. Domestic demand is for cost-effective and cost-reducing solutions for the entire lamp, while foreign countries demand high-light-efficiency solutions. In response to these two needs, chip manufacturers must optimize their chips in the direction of improving the luminous efficiency lm/W, increasing the brightness, reducing the size, increasing the lm/$ of the product, and developing high-voltage chips and flip-chip technology.
2. Opportunities for the development of mainland chip companies
Compared with 2012, the overall LED industry chain increased by 28% in 2013, the downstream application side increased by 31%, and the upstream LED chips increased by 17%. In 2015, packaging will account for 50% of the world's share, and China will also become the largest base for packaging. This is a good development opportunity for Chinese LED chip manufacturers. Liu Rong said that some large foreign packaging companies are building factories in my country. According to the current development rate, my country will become the world's largest packaging base in the future.
With the development of the global packaging industry, mainland China is rapidly growing into the world's most important LED chip manufacturing base, accounting for 27% of the global scale in 2013. It is expected that mainland China's manufacturing scale will account for more than 50% of the price in the next three years. In 2013, the proportion of localized chips reached 80%, an increase of 8 percentage points from 2012.
2. Development trend of chip substrate technology
With the advancement and development of midstream packaging and downstream application technologies, upstream chips also need to be constantly adjusted and optimized to cater to current demand trends. Dr. Liu Rong said that in the future, LED applications will develop in the direction of high light efficiency, low cost, systematic savings (such as LED filament), controllability, intelligence, and design. This requires the chip to be optimized in the direction of high brightness/light efficiency of a single lamp bead, a small number of lamp beads, high power efficiency, low cost, good heat dissipation, and high chip brightness per unit area. At the same time, there are also requirements for the production process. For this reason, Dr. Liu Rong explained the development trends of two substrate technologies and two packaging methods.
Development trends of sapphire and other substrate technologies
Sapphire has an inherent advantage as a substrate - it is transparent, but the price is high. Due to the significant advantages of sapphire, the products produced by this technology currently account for more than 95% of similar products, and this technology will still be in a dominant position for a long time in the future. At present, the unit area price of 4″ sapphire substrate is equal to that of 2″. 4″ has significant advantages in yield improvement and labor saving, and will quickly replace 2″ technology. The unit area cost of 6″ is twice that of 4″, and the process difficulty of uniformity control is also significantly increased, so it is not cost-saving yet.
Silicon substrate and silicon carbide substrate
Because the substrate absorbs light, the light efficiency of silicon substrate epitaxial chips is lower than that of sapphire substrate. Currently, there are few applications in the market. In order to manufacture high-light-efficiency LEDs, silicon substrate epitaxial wafers require a complex substrate stripping process, which results in low yield, high cost, and low cost performance compared with sapphire substrate products.
Silicon carbide substrate is also a transparent substrate, but its cost is significantly higher than sapphire, and there is no advantage in cost performance. As the sapphire large-size substrate technology continues to mature, the market space for such substrates will continue to shrink. Therefore, in the future, the sapphire substrate technology route will maintain its dominance.
Development trend of formal/flip-chip LED chips
Formal LED chips can effectively improve light efficiency, shorten MOCVD growth time, and reduce the number of chip process burnings, thereby reducing costs and improving yield. According to the current development situation, the average cost per unit lm/W of formal chips should decrease by about 10% in the next three years.
Flip-chip is a more cost-effective solution for high-reliability devices, which requires better technical cooperation between chip and packaging companies to achieve it. Flip-chip combines packaging technology to reduce overall costs by increasing input power density and simplifying packaging processes, such as back coating with phosphor. In the future, the development trend of flip chip performance may have two points. First, by improving the light efficiency of the chip and the thermal conductivity of the package, the purpose of steadily reducing the chip size can be achieved while maintaining the same optical power output. Size reduction is expected to be 5%-10% per year. The second is to combine the characteristics of flip chip to achieve the purpose of white light without packaging and reduce the cost of LED devices.
Finally, Dr. Liu Rong introduced the future strategic plan of Huacan Optoelectronics. He said that Huacan Optoelectronics has specializations in the industry. Huacan's goal is to become the world's leading high-quality chip supplier. Huacan will adhere to the chip-led strategy and become an independent chip supplier. On the premise of consolidating its first position in the display market, the company will vigorously expand the backlight and lighting markets, allowing the company to diversify its development in the chip market. Technically, because of the excellent performance of flip-chip and high-voltage chips, it will be an important trend in the chip field in the future. Dr. Liu Rong said that Huacan will increase its research and development efforts in this area and keep up with the cutting-edge technology in the chip field. Dr. Liu Rong once again pointed out that with the advent of the explosive period of the LED industry, in order to meet market demand, Huacan will continue to expand the scale of chip production. Huacan will be a manufacturer of high-quality chips, so it will continue to carry out technological innovation, increase original technology reserves, strengthen product features, segment markets, and strengthen layout.
ANNA