OSRAM Opto Semiconductors today held an opening ceremony for its 35,000 square meter new LED wafer fabrication plant in Penang, Malaysia. It is the company’s first ever LED chip plant in Asia and currently the most modern facility in the world. The plant will produce chips for light emitting diodes, the light source of the future. Y.B. Dato’ Sri Mustapa Mohamed, the Minister of International Trade and Industry of Malaysia, Y.A.B. Tuan Lim Guan Eng, the Chief Minister of Penang, Martin Goetzeler, CEO of OSRAM GmbH, and Dr Ruediger Mueller, CEO of OSRAM Opto Semiconductors GmbH, officiate at the inauguration ceremony of the plant. OSRAM has doubled its chip production capacities investing in the new chip fab in Penang and the chip fab in Regensburg, Germany.

The new plant is the second LED chip manufacturing facility of OSRAM Opto Semiconductors. It will produce LED chips in indium-gallium-nitride technology on 4-inch wafers, serving as the basis for blue, green and white LEDs. Together with its Regensburg (Germany) LED chip plant, OSRAM is poised to respond quickly to the fast growing LED market with superior quality, sufficient quantities and at cost advantages.

The production facility in Penang makes OSRAM Opto Semiconductors the first LED manufacturer with high-volume chip production facilities both in Europe and Asia and puts the company in a good position to continue its leadership in the LED industry. It will also enable the company to take on this fast growing market.

The prospects of the LED market remain bright. Market researchers forecast a threefold increase up to almost 13 billion Euros by 2012 for light emitting diodes (LEDs) and organic LEDs (OLEDs). These technologies offer a particularly small size, a long lifetime and top levels of energy-efficiency, thus opening up new applications and new markets. As OSRAM CEO Martin Goetzeler proclaimed, “We are shaping the lighting market of the future and we are a leading manufacturer in all stages of the LED value chain. We already achieve 17 percent of our sales with Solid State Lighting. In connection with classic technologies, our LED portfolio of products, systems and solutions will raise energy saving potential for lighting up to 60 percent. This represents a major contribution to climate protection.” The list of LED applications keeps on expanding: architectural lighting, backlight displays, mobile terminal devices, solid state lighting, automotive lighting and many more to come. Today, we already see projectors being lit up by LEDs, advertising boards being replaced by LED display video walls and cars illuminating the streets with LED headlights.

“Cost, and more so the talented and experienced workforces are all in favour of Penang when it comes to choosing the site for our new facility,” said Dr Ruediger Mueller, CEO of OSRAM Opto Semiconductors. “But it was also the long-term partnership with the Malaysian authorities that made it the top choice, after all we have operated in Penang for over 30 years.”

The opening ceremony was held on site in Bayan Lepas Free Industrial Zone of Penang. Representatives of the workforce were also present to witness the momentous event. The employees of the LED assembly plant together with their new colleagues in the chip manufacturing facility were thrilled to be part of the world’s most advanced LED chip plant and the growing market.