Ever Bright Opt Tech Taps Specialist Know-how to Sharpen LED Technology

Ever Bright Opt Tech Corp. is a startup, whose parent L&C Lighting Technology Corp. was founded in 1989, that has been aggressively jockeying to outdo competition in the LED-lighting segment. To achieve such end, Ever Bright steadily looks for specialist help at the peak of the knowledge pyramid.

Besides being helped by its parent company's R&D team, mainly consisting of former senior engineers from the government-backed Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), the company has taken on professor B.J. Huang of the renowned National Taiwan University's Mechanical Engineering Department to develop new technologies.

Over the past few years and with Huang's help, Ever Bright has introduced several unique products, including a dynamic thermal-dissipation lighting fixture for high-power LED lamps, a thematic LED light for artwork, and an Internet-protocol (IP) controlled LED landscape lighting system.

Effective Cooling Mechanism

According to Huang, the thermal-dissipation fixture can keep junction temperature, a major gauge of LED thermal characteristics, under 60 Celsius, meaning the light will last a long time before decaying. He says the fixture is mostly composed of an outer cover, a dynamic heat-transfer and reduction mechanism, and an LED module. "The heat-transfer and reduction mechanism is mounted under the cover to cool the unit via thermal absorption. Such means effectively buffers fluctuating ambient temperature and poor ventilation," he elaborates.

The core of the dynamic heat-transfer and reduction mechanism is a 1.2-kg coolant compressor, which Hung convinced Teco Electrical to specially build. "The core is multi-functional, so works on more than lighting fixtures," Huang notes. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia has given Huang a prize for the outstanding core, according to Huang, with the item also patented in Taiwan, the United States, and Europe.

Amazing Effect

The thematic lighting system casts new light literally on artwork. At the opening of Ever Bright's incubation center, Huang demonstrated the amazing effect of the lighting system by mounting the LED lights around copies of Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" and Van Gogh's "Starry Night": by changing the LED colors from light yellow and orange to green and blue, the light in Monet's painting seemed to actually change from dawn to dusk and then late night. "Despite masterful attempts by Monet and Van Gogh to use paints to show changing light and shadow, the visual effect seems static. By using LED lighting, we've successfully turned inanimate canvases into virtually natural landscapes," Huang says.

Huang's IP-controlled landscape lighting system is smarter, less expensive than conventional counterparts for easy operation and maintenance. "Users can reprogram color-changing sequences DIY to suit preferences. With the complicated designs of traditional types, users are forced to rely on suppliers for servicing, including expensive reprogramming," he says.

In addition, Huang's IP-controlled lighting uses only one wire to power all the LED lamps, compared to many wires on conventional lighting systems. This system controls lighting via the Internet. "Our tests showed us controlling the lamps from 100 meters away," he boasts, adding that the system consumes around 250W compared with 700W on conventional types.

Tapping Academic Resources

Ever Bright, specializing in LED lighting and solar products, recently opened a laboratory at NTU's incubation center to tap the school's resources to hone its own R&D capability.

The company began in 2004 working with NTU's New Energy Center, where Huang is the director, on innovative LED lighting technologies. The center is known for several unique LED technologies, including the loop heat pipe (LHP) thermal module for LED street-lighting developed jointly with Russian scientists and Advanced Thermal Devices (ATD) Inc. of Taiwan. The module is now cooling 150W LED streetlight on the NTU campus. "This is the world's first 150W streetlight," Huang claims.

Huang maintains that renewable energies can only reduce CO2 emissions 20% at best by 2030. "But energy-saving technologies can cut as much as 50%," he preaches.

Besides Ever Bright, L&C Lighting also owns Core Lighting Tech Corp., a manufacturer of high intensity discharge (HID) and compact fluorescent lamps; and ALKI Electronics Tech Corp., which specializes in electronic ballasts. Allen Tseng, L&C Lighting's president and CEO, says his company and affiliates now hire 1,500 employees, including 120 R&D engineers, who are led by Dr. Bill Jiang, a former senior research fellow at ITRI.

The group runs marketing outlets in Taiwan, China, Europe, and North America, and a factory in Shenzhen, China equipped with around 10 production lines, with the plant's projected annual revenue over the next few years to total US$150 million. "We will increase production lines to 48 and workers to 3,000 in three years," Tseng boasts.