What will be growth industries for PCBs?

What will be growth industries for PCBs?

We have used the Edison incandescent light now for over 100 years. But, unfortunately, most of the power goes for heat and not light. The EPA says that if each US home replaced just ONE (1) incandescent light bulb with a solid state illumination LED (SSI), the USA would save more than $600 million in annual energy costs and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars.

Some of the advantages of SSI LEDs are:

• 50,000 hours MTBF

• LEDs are in ‘mission-critical’ applications already like street lights, traffic lights, automobile tail lights (soon to be headlights), stadiums and billboards, LCB backlights and for medical effects

• 70% efficiency (82 lumens/watt) compared to incandescent at 15% (17 lm/w) and compact fluorescent at 48-60 lm/w

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• A 100 watt incandescent bulb is 1750 luments, a 3 watt HB LED is only 240 lumens for the same lighting effect

• LEDs can be color corrected to match sunlight

• In less than 5 years SSI will be 150 lm/w and in the range of $2.00 - $7.00 each

• There already are LEDs that work off of 117 VAC

• Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) displays are now in mobile phones and TVs

• Compact fluorescent lights (CFL) have 3 to 5 milligrams of mercury and a difficulty in matching sunlight

I think that Solid State Illumination (SSI) or high brightness LEDs will be a BIG NEW business for the electronics industry. What do you think?

ADDITION:

David Carey of Portelligent just did a ‘tear-down’ of a CFL and a HB-LED of about 75 W rating. The CFL was sub-$5 but the HB-LED was ~$80 !! If you look at the photo from the article (http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=OXGNBXT450B1MQSNDLPSKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=210604761) below, the HB-LED must have been built for some’rugged’ application. But both have circuit boards in them!

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