Hot Picks of the Week Oct.3- 7

Highlights this week:

It has been awhile since LEDinside has handpicked interesting news of the week, and we apologize for the long delay. We would also like to issue an early notice we will not be around on Oct. 10, 2016 (next Monday) because of national holidays in Taiwan.

Osram has been very active over the past months, and recent market rumors have resurfaced about interested Chinese buyers. This time the rumored acquisitor is its Chinese rival San’an Opto, who will mostly be looking into merging Osram Opto, according to LEDinside sources. San’an Opto is rumored to be offering a generous EUR 7.2 billion for the German LED company, but there are also some estimating the German company can fetch a sales price of nearly EUR 8 billion.

The company also announced two important developments this week, including the appointment of a new head of their innovation and research department Thorsten Müller, who was formerly CEO of the Connected Devices and Solutions division at Bosch. The German company has also completed its acquisition of U.S. automotive lighting module manufacturer Novità Technologies. Osram also announced on Friday afternoon it had successfully developed a large LED chip for adaptive lighting, with the aid from a large German research coalition including members from Fraunhofer Institute, Hella, Infineon and others.

There is also strong interest shown by Philips and GE in developing smart LED lighting technology. Philips announced its smart bulb Philips Hue can now also work with Google Home systems, adding another smart home platform to its Hue bulbs. GE Lighting has also announced winners of its smart LED bulb hackathon, and the new designs might eventually be commercialized into next generation lighting products.

Leading R&D institute CEA LETI (LETI) announced several important partnerships this week with Taiwan’s III and Stanford’s System X Alliance, which includes a lot of top players in the technology industry including Google (also known as Alphabet). The institute’s strong interest in IoT and 5G communications, might open up new opportunities for related applications, such as smart LED lighting.

There are also a few interesting product applications unveiled this week, for instance Sony’s interest in grass growing at sports venues and other application sectors using specially designed LED grow lights. Neutrogena is also bringing down LED facial mask beauty regime costs, which might relieve men’s wallet a bit if your significant other is obsessed with perfect skin. But what really caught our attention with the Neutrogena design, is the mask is an affordable US $40, but a controller limits the usage to 30, before requesting a replacement, which offers a more sustainable business model, since the LEDs in the mask probably will outlive the controller anyway.

VLC is also being taken to a whole new level by Darmouth University, where the light does not even have to be turned on for it to transmit data. Read below to find out how this IR-based lighting technology works.

If you missed out on a full-day of presentations on micro-LED at LEDforum 2016, please check out our overview article: LEDforum 2016: Micro-LEDs Potential and Barriers Before Commercialization A couple more articles will be up at a later date.

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