Yole’s ‘UV LED – Technology, Manufacturing and Application Trends’ report forecasts that big companies from the visible LED industry – namely Philips Lumileds and LG Innotek – will continue to secure a foothold in the UV LED business. According to Yole’s analysis, the entry of these giants will help to further develop the industry, the market and the technology based on their strong experience of the visible LED industry.
Thanks to their compactness and low cost of ownership, UV LED technology continues to make its way in the booming UV curing business, through replacement of incumbent technologies such as mercury lamps.
“Thanks to this an overall UV LED market that represented only ~$20 million in 2008 grew to ~$90m in 2014, at a compound annual growth rate of 28.5%,” explained Pars Mukish, Business Unit Manager, LED activities at Yole. Such growth is likely to continue as LED-powered UV curing spreads across ink, adhesive and coating industries.
“By 2017/2018, the UV LED market should also see part of its revenues coming from UVC disinfection and purification applications, for which device performance is not yet sufficient. The UV LED business is therefore expected to grow from ~$90m in 2014 to ~$520m in 2019,” suggested Mukish. The market’s evaluation takes into account only standard applications, where UV LEDs replace UV lamps.
Pars Mukish added: “The potential is even greater, if we consider UV LEDs’ ability to enable new concepts in areas like general lighting, horticultural lighting, biomedical devices, and in fighting hospital-acquired infections (HAIs)”. Even this is just scratching the surface of UV LEDs’ real potential. While the new applications do not yet have a strong impact on market size, Yole expects them to possibly count for nearly 10% of the total UV LED market size by 2019.
Less than ten companies were developing and manufacturing these devices in 2008. Since then, more than 50 companies have entered the market, with more than 30 of these entering between 2012 and 2014, mostly attracted by the high margin when the overcapacity and strong price pressure from the ‘LED TV crisis’ had taken its toll on the visible LED industry. The new enetrants were mostly small and medium enterprises.
A good example of the growth drive generated by the visible LED giants is that they have made a nearly full transition of their process to 6-inch sapphire substrates. “Compared to a 2-inch” based process, this can provide at least a 30% overall productivity increase, which would help to further reduce manufacturing cost…” explained Mukish.
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