siliconindia | | May 20189having some kind of coating disap-peared. The LED chip, although needs far more expensive equipment than the FL or Incandescent related ones, is something that can be made by a few in the world and distributed cheaply throughout at a very low piece price, and in bulk. The control gear part, meaning the LED Driver, or the FL ballast, was anyway an electronic part for many years now. LED lights do need other mechanical parts like the diffuser, the reflector and other similar to the FL lights ­ but these items can come out of general production equip-ment used for many other non-lighting equipment. As such, there is no need for a LED lighting manufacturer to in-vest in a very expensive and specific production equipment.To set up a luminaire manufactur-ing company, you need to have some electronic PCB populating equip-ment, like the SMD machine, paste/glue printer, a wave solder, and some other assembly tables. With this, you can make both the lamp part and the control gear part of the LED light. Rest of the items like the diffuser, and reflector can be easily bought from the general mechanical industry (not specific to lighting). All this is quite well affordable even by a small to medium sized company, and doesn't have a very long payback too. This fundamental change ­ the lack of ne-cessity of investing in specific expen-sive production equipment to set up a luminaire manufacturing business ­ changed the lighting industry dras-tically in the last few years, since the LED technology became popular. The market share of earlier globally dom-inant players, dwindled very rapidly. Their massive investments became suddenly redundant.The reason being sudden entrance of numerous small, or many other new players into the lighting industry. Many MSME companies, along with many other non-lighting big compa-nies got into lighting. Today you see, the erstwhile makers of plumbing equipment, kitchen equipment, home-wares, whitegoods, and even compa-nies purely in the finance sector are now getting into lighting. There are numerous small companies coming up with LED lighting and capturing a good part of the market. The earlier dominant players are either restructur-ing their businesses, or exiting from the lighting businesses, or selling off their lighting businesses to new and quite often smaller entrants. There's lot of innovation in lighting with the advent of low cost LED technology. You now find lights in many more va-riety of shapes and sizes, colours and functionalities. In LED, there's almost no standardization. Imagination of the designer and the commercial con-straints are the only limits for variety.Façade lighting is undergoing a big transformation. You see examples of huge buildings now illuminated with various messages and moving pictures ­ all this is enabled by LED technolo-gy. Advent of Human Centric Lighting is another enablement of LED tech-nology. Human Centric Lighting is where the whiteness (colour tempera-ture) of the indoor lighting changes, or can be changed. Usually, this ability is used to change the light indoor to match the whiteness of the light out-door throughout the day. There are lot of companies getting into Human Centric Lighting now. LED technol-ogy has enabled Connected Lighting. Now, lights can be connected to oth-er lights, or to other equipment in the building and others to Wifi systems, and Building Management systems. This is generally referred to as Con-nected Lighting, or a part of IoT. This has become easy to do since the pop-ularity of LED technology in lighting. LED lighting technology is one of the key enablers in the current Smart Cities projects. There are a number of things like Connected lighting and IoT, Energy saving through efficient lighting, using lighting systems more effectively for safety, and using light-ing for comfort and decoration have become feasible due to the advent of LED technology. LED technology has not only transformed the light-ing industry, but has made lighting a much bigger part of everyday life compared to other technologies, and has influenced many other aspects of life. As such, it can be called as one of the key technological innovations of this century. The earlier dominant players are either restructuring their businesses, or exiting from the lighting businesses, or selling off their lighting businesses to new and quite often smaller entrants.B S Praveen
< Page 8 | Page 10 >