Brightek Optoeletronic started to develop automotive LED products in 2007, manufacturing high power automotive LEDs in Taiwan and low power ones in Shenzhen, China. The company has developed automotive LEDs for eight years, providing various exterior vehicle lights and attracted attention from the LED market in recent years. Weiming Pai, General Manager of the company spoke to LEDinside in an exclusive interview about their experience in automotive lighting market.

Chinese automotive lighting market can be divided into three sectors, including their own brands, joint venture brands and original equipment (OE) brands. The most important aspect of entering the automotive lighting market is actual performance, and not the LED company’s size. Brightek entered the market in early 2007, when the company first developed high mounted/S3 lamp, and other tail light product range. These product lines helped them accumulate experience and actual revenue. In recent years, Brightek tapped into daytime running lights (DRL), and is providing solutions to automotive lights manufacturers as market deployment strategy.

Currently, Brightek focuses on original equipment (OE) market in China, followed by after- market business. Chinese automotive lighting market will see booming growth in automotive lighting brands from 2016 to 2017, observed Pai. Meanwhile, Brightek is actively cooperating with car lighting brands manufacturers on automotive lighting designs. After the automotive luminaire and automotive lighting module design is completed, Brightek will discuss the optics design with clients. Despite the time consuming introduction period, the resulting partnership has delivered stellar performance for Brightek.

Thanks to the deployment of Chinese automotive lighting brands, Brightek started to work with joint venture lighting manufactures by providing high C/P ratio LED lights.

Chinese automotive manufacturers are actively introducing LED light source to their vehicles, according to Brightek. Brightek will also release high/ low beam LED headlight during the last half of 2016. If LED headlights could become standardized equipment in the future, the next challenge for LED manufacturers would be production capacity and price.

The main advantage of Brightek’s products is in the strict demand of LED package specifications, which adopts eutectic die bonding, ceramic substrate or SMC substrate, and multi- angle primary optics packaging. Eutectic die bonding enables low heat resistance and higher reliability. Currently Brightek’s LED tail lights product portfolio includes 0.5W to 2W LEDs; headlight modules without light guide. For DRL the products range from 0.5W to 1W; and 10W with light guide.

Pai pointed out in niche markets including automotive LEDs, UV LED and IR LED are more difficult for manufacturers with large economics of scale advantages to develop, and it can be time and cost consuming to acquire massive order volumes, the product design and co- design with clients can also be challenging. On the contrary, it may be an opportunity for SMEs to break in the market.

(Translator: Emma Chang, Editor, LEDinside)