Lumileds nails win at the Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards

The company won in the Hardware - Electronic Manufacturing category thanks to LED color yield improvement.

Lighting manufacturer Lumileds bagged the Hardware - Electronic Manufacturing Award at the recently concluded Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards, presented by Singapore Business Review.

The inaugural awards event honours enterprises that take risks and lead the charge in developing groundbreaking projects, digital services, reimagined strategies, and technological initiatives. Winners were judged on the basis of uniqueness and innovation, effectiveness and impact, and dynamism.

In the white-light LED manufacturing industry, one of the technical challenges related to dispensing phosphor material is uniformity, accuracy and consistency of the distribution volume, which could directly affect the color rendering index (CRI), CIE distribution and the final color yield and utilisation of the LED.

To address these challenges, Lumileds set out to find where the real problem lies and innovatively introduced process changes in manufacturing.

Lumileds said that one problem in phosphor dispensing is variation in viscosity of the potting mixture (phosphor powders and silicone). Such variation would include texture changes over a short period of time, stringing the mixture which can sometimes cause air bubbles to be mixed into it, and the hardening of silicone before it is separated from the phosphor.

Like a light bulb going off upon a eureka breakthrough, the company figured out that dispensing the potting mixture at a higher temperature prevents separation of phosphor and silicone in the sedimentation process. This prompted the team of experts to optimise the dispensing ambient temperature to prove their hypothesis.

“Our experiments showed that dispensing the potting mixture at a higher temperature prevents separation of phosphor and silicone in the sedimentation process. By optimizing the dispensing ambient temperature, Lumileds has proven that phosphor and silicone can be effectively separated, which produces extremely concentrated CIE distributions in our LEDs,” said a company representative.

As a result, the combined process changes improved the desired color yield and led to the desired color points, reducing yield loss and contributing to productivity gains.

Lumileds’ product range includes lamps, halogens, and LEDs for automotive, computer displays, televisions, and general lighting. The company said that they attained 30% energy savings with its LED solutions after relocating its existing manufacturing plant to a much bigger facility.

Watch the interview the Lumileds team to know more about their success:

The Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards, presented by Singapore Business Review, was held on 3 December 2019 at the Shangri-La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur.

This year’s nominations were judged by a panel consisting of Alvin SH Gan, Executive Director, Partner, Head of IT enabled Transformation (ITeT) at KPMG Malaysia; Yoon Hoong Hoh, Partner, ASEAN Digital Assurance Leader, Head of Diversified Technology and Communications Group at Ernst & Young; Justin Ong, Partner and FSI Financial and Regulatory Risk Leader at Deloitte Asia Pacific; and Hari Iyer, Executive Director, Advisory at BDO Kuala Lumpur.

If you would like to join the 2020 awards and be acclaimed for your company’s exceptional technology innovations, please email [email protected]