Luminus Devices Founder and Chief Technology Officer Alexei Erchak (Part 3)

SM: Where did you look for business opportunities once you realized traditional LED markets were not viable?

AE: We got connected to InFocus, a projector company. They started talking to us about projection applications and rear-projection television in particular. They said that the lamps they were using in those applications did not last very long, which was the Achilles heel of that market. This was in 2003. When the lamps blew out consumers had to pay several hundred dollars for a replacement that would take several months to arrive. They wanted to replace those lamps with LEDs. The only problem was they could not get enough light from the current LEDs.

SM: It sounds like it was the perfect application.

AE: Being an engineer myself, I was a bit skeptical. I asked them why they did not just buy a lot of LEDs. They said they tried to buy several hundred of the brightest LEDs they could find, and they tried to funnel all of the light from the LEDs onto the DLP micro display from TI and then project that onto the screen. They simply could not do it. In addition to having a complex optical system to collect the light they had enormous losses and could not get enough light by combining conventional LEDs.

The reason it failed is simple, and is directly tied to the brightness of the LEDs versus the total amount of light from the LEDs. If you have two LEDs, the brightness is the amount of light divided by the area the light it coming from. That is how you define the brightness of a source. If you have two LEDs of equal brightness and you bring them together you still have the same brightness because the area is twice as large as well.

What was needed was more light from a single source. This meant they could increase the current going into a single LED or they could make the LED itself bigger. It turns out with a photonic lattice, because it is a nano structure technique to get the light out, it does not matter what the size of the chip is. The nano structure gets all of the light out of the top surface. It does not matter what the proximity to the edges is.

SM: Which means brightness was controlled without size being a factor?

AE: Exactly. You could make a small chip or a large chip. It does not matter. All of our designs were independent of chip size, and this was unique. Now we have an application which is begging for a large chip, and none of the existing LED designs could do that. Ours could. That was something we could build a business off of. An added bonus was that we were able to do this in the television market, which is a very lucrative market. We were enabling a new form of television with our new lighting source that did not include mercury, required no warm-up time, and solved an existing problem that nothing else could solve.

SM: How big is the market for the segment of television you are going after?

AE: In 2003, the predicted market size for rear-projection televisions for 2008 was 20 million sets. Rear-projection TV was the only way you could buy large-screen televisions at a reasonable price. You could buy a 60-inch TV for $3,000. That was in 2003. We felt this was a great market and if we could get just a fraction of that market, the expectation was that we would eventually replace all of the light sources.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Luminus Devices Founder and Chief Technology Officer Alexei Erchak
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