LED startup promises better efficacy, higher robustness
e:lumix is a relatively new company, based in Augsburg (Germany). Nevertheless, the company claims that it owns the entire value chain of LED production including semiconductor manufacturing. At the LpS Symposium in Bregenz, CEO and co-founder Thomas Zabel said his company is able to provide LEDs with an efficacy of 180 lm per watt. With this statement, Zabel contradicted his previous speaker, Decai Sun from Philips Lumileds. Sun, an experienced senior manager for product development, described the current goal for the LED industry to exceed the threshold of 130 lm/W.
Zabel said his company is in the process of patent application for a driver technique that easily can achieve a significantly higher efficacy. In the laboratory, the company has already been able to design LEDs with an efficacy of more than 240 lm/W, Zabel said. However, he declined to provide details on his company’s driver technique, referring to the ongoing patent application.
The company already has another unique technology implemented in its LEDs: According to Zabel, the e:lumix LEDs are inherently protected against overcurrent. The semiconductor features a protection layer within the LED chip that effectively overcomes the hot spot problem. "This is not a matter of electronic control but of utilizing a physical effect inside the chip", Zabel said. With the protecting layer in place, the LED chips withstand an overcurrent condition of several times the normal current.
Zabel also said e:lumix has a solution for the reliability problem in outdoor lighting applications: When it comes to service life expectations of 30.000 operating hours and beyond, the main source of failure is in the power supply and driver circuit, not the LED itself, Zabel explained. For this reason, the company has designed an LED array that does away with power supplies – the LEDs can be connected directly to the 230VAC mains grid. While he was unable to specify the number of LED strings switched in parallel and the LEDs in it switched in series, the lamp is already in serial production and has achieved the certifications necessary for street lighting applications. And of course the lamp is protected by the above mentioned overcurrent mechanism, Zabel pointed out.
For more information on e:lumix, visit https://www.elumix.de/pages/en/index_en.html
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
