The global LED market is taking off in 2008 and is expected to become a full-blown one by the year 2010, according HP Lighting, a major LED manufacturer in Taiwan.

HP Lighting’s insight is shared by LEDinside, which has predicted that as LED makers in Taiwan and Japan keep raising production, LED prices are bound to fall further before 2009. Lower prices will eventually lead to higher LED penetration among households, said the LED industry research group.

Charles Wei, general manager of HP Lighting, pointed out in a recent LED seminar that as most competitors are troubled by technology bottleneck, his company has come up with one-of-a-kind technology on packaging that can improve LED products’ heat dissipation and luminescence efficiency.

Wei said that as a world-wide ban on incandescent light bulbs is foreseen for the future, there is great potential for the LED market in years to come. Fluorescent lamps are now more cost-efficient than LED, but with mercury as an essential ingredient, the former is sometimes controversial due to environmental concerns.

However, Wei continued, LED lamps still need to bring down production cost in order to replace traditional lamps. He said LED may not be popular among households with luminous flux higher than 1,000 Lm, and high penetration requires cost lower than USD$1/Klm.

Charles Wei, General Manager of HP Lighting

In order to lower production cost to that level, LED makers still have a long way to go in terms of technology improvement. If efficiency in various processes can be raised, LED luminescence efficiency will quadruple by 2015, he added.

In addition to production cost and efficiency, several obstacles also need to be overcome in the packaging process to make LED a more accessible product, Wei said. Higher packaging and labor cost for high power LED is a major concern, while technology issues such as lower luminescence efficiency for warm white LED with high color-rendering index, are also critical.

With a design center in Japan and manufacturing headquarter in Taiwan, HP Lighting now offers products widely used in LCD backlighting, flashing light for camera and so on. The company’s major shareholders include Taiwan semiconductor foundry United Microelectronics Corporation, and notebook maker Quanta Computer Inc.