Luminus Devices Founder and Chief Technology Officer Alexei Erchak (Part 1)

Alexei Erchak founded Luminus in 2002 after being awarded his PhD in materials sciences and engineering from MIT. There he designed and tested photonic lattice LED technology which has evolved into PhlatLight, the most powerful LED in the world. PhlatLight offers a 20,000-hour life span and high production volumes (low cost), which has been enticing to TV manufacturing since Samsung elected to use PhlatLight in 2007 for a range of rear-projection televisions. This success has led to expansion of the PhlatLight product line to a wider range of applications.

SM: Alexei, take us back to where your journey begins. Where are you from and how did you get into Luminus?

AE: I grew up in Saratoga Springs, New York. I went to Skidmore College there, which is a small but fairly renowned liberal arts college. I majored in math and physics. It was a great institution to go to because there was an inverse student to faculty ratio. I was one of two math majors and one of two physics majors. There were probably 25 PhD faculty in the two departments combined that I could draw upon. I got a lot of individual attention. My entire senior year was one big independent study of everything that I wanted to work on. That was a very useful experience for me in that it prepared me for the future when I had to adapt to some of the unexpected things that got thrown at me in starting a company.

In 1997 I spent a little time at Sandia National Labs doing some summer intern work. After that I headed to MIT and entered the material science and engineering department on the PhD track, and that is when I got introduced to what are called photonic lattices. Photonic lattices are kind of a technology that formed the basis for Luminus.

SM: Can you give us some context of the technology?

AE: I went to a talk by Professor John Joannopoulus, who is one of the founders of photonic lattices and was actually one of the co-founders of Luminus although he did not take an active role in the company.

A photonic lattice is basically a nanostructure that is placed in a material and changes the behavior of light. Of course there is a lot of cutting-edge physics behind that one-line summary I gave you. MIT was the leader in this world. The work I did involved using photonic lattices to improve the performance of light emitters, with a particular focus on semiconductor light emitters. I spent a lot of time looking at LEDs and how photonic lattices can more efficiently extract light from them.

SM: What did you find were the key opportunities for innovation in that space?

AE: LEDs have been around since the 1960s, and there has not been much change in the way LED chips are designed. There have been incredible breakthroughs in materials which have led to a wider availability of colors. All LEDs were essentially low brightness emitters that you see in cell phones and on indicator lights. There had been no real change in LED chip design, so photonic lattices were very much an innovative way to look at chip design. It is taking an approach of trying to manipulate light on the wavelength scale, to get the light to leave the chip so that the chip becomes brighter.

SM: What was your goal in terms of application?

AE: The goal at MIT was to make the LED more efficient. A lot of the light that is generated remains internal; it bounces around inside of the chip and is eventually re-absorbed and converted into heat. The photonic lattice thus forces more light out, making it brighter and reducing heat, which makes it more efficient. It results in more light per unit of energy input into the device.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Luminus Devices Founder and Chief Technology Officer Alexei Erchak
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