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Epistar's Red LEDs Reportedly Integrated Into Apple Watch

2015/06/05 | By Ken Liu

According to Taiwan's light emitting diode (LED) industry executives, Epistar Corp.'s red LED chips have been integrated into Apple Watches, which also measure blood pressure and heart rate.

Executives of Epistar, according to Wikipedia is Taiwan's largest maker of LEDs and the world's largest for red and yellow LEDs, have declined to  comment on the reports, simply saying that all wearable devices that also function as health monitors need LEDs to indicate parameters being measured. They predict health monitoring to become the primary feature to be promoted by makers of all wearable devices in the future, creating even more demand for LEDs.

Industry executives point out that Epistar's LED chips go into Apple Watches through Japanese LED packagers and module assemblers, meaning the latter buy Epistar chips for secondary processing for delivery as finished LEDs, adding that although the Japan-headquartered Nichia Corp. is the world's No.1 LED maker, red LED is not among its product lineup.

Incidentally Epistar is vigorously developing flip-chip and chip scale package (CSP) technologies in a bid to further widen the lead ahead of mainland Chinese competitors. The company will begin to deliver products with the two technologies in the second quarter of this year, projecting the two new products to account for a combined 10 percent of its total revenue by the end of this year.

Epistar Chairman B.J Lee points out that its mainstream LED technology leads that of its mainland Chinese competitors by one year, its flip-chip technology by two years and its CSP technology by three years. He notes that flip chip is already a popular technology on the market, being mainly built into liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs as backlight. Genesis Photonics Inc. is another Taiwanese LED maker capable of making flip chips.

Epistar has announced acquiring a factory-and-office building at the Hsinchu Science Park from DRAM chipmaker ProMOS Technologies Inc. for NT$570 million (US$18.38 million), which will enable Epistar to consolidate all its R&D and operating units around the park into this building, which occupies 52,800 square meters.