Upstream industry in China LED urgent breakthrough

Beijing Olympic Games is not only the national sports athletes and sports arena, or LED show their style and charm of the stage. LED in the opening ceremony, the Olympic venues, landscape lighting, indoor and outdoor full-color display and other aspects of the outstanding performance, with stunning visual feast for the audience, so that people have a more intuitive and profound and new experience and knowledge of LED, the application and promotion of LED will further accelerate. Experts predict that in 2010 Shanghai World Expo will become another milestone in LED applications, when China's LED industry will usher in a new peak.

But behind the dazzling and brilliant LED games in Beijing, there is a lack of core technology in the upstream of LED in China, hidden industry worries. It is understood that the Olympic Games in the use of LED devices and lamps are mainly packaged and produced by Chinese enterprises, but the value chain of the highest power chip is basically imported from abroad. The Beijing Olympic Games to enhance the LED application level, but also reflects our LED products with low grade based, lack of core technologies with independent intellectual property rights, high performance LED and power LED products have to be imported.

LED industry chain includes epitaxial wafer growth and chip manufacturing upstream industries, LED devices and LED packaging midstream industries and downstream industries of LED applications. After years of development, China has formed a more complete industrial chain from raw materials, epitaxial growth, chip manufacturing, device packaging, application products and supporting equipment and equipment. According to the latest statistics, at present, China's enterprises engaged in LED has reached more than 2 thousand. Unfortunately, the application of products and supporting enterprises accounted for the vast majority of more than 1 thousand and 700; followed by packaging enterprises, about 600; the least is in the extension of the enterprise growth, chip manufacturing, research units and production enterprises with a total of more than and 40. The distribution of such industrial chain shows that China's LED enterprises are still concentrated in the application and packaging of the industrial chain, the upstream industry is weak, the whole industry is lack of core competitiveness.

Our LED epitaxial chip production although in recent years a great development and progress, but overall still stays in the middle and low level, also cannot be widely applied to the high quality of the display, and the middle and large size LCD backlight and other high-end applications, high-grade epitaxial chip used by LED application products in China of high efficiency and high reliability. Almost all rely on imports, high efficiency power type chip at present there is no domestic manufacturers to provide.

The current LED upstream industry showing a good trend, the domestic upstream LED upstream chip companies continue to increase. This shows that the industry is generally optimistic about the prospects for the LED industry, on the other hand, with the gradual maturity and growth of the industry, the focus of the development will be gradually concentrated in the upstream areas of high profits. Data show that China's LED chip production in recent years, the growth rate of more than 75%, 2008 high brightness LED chip production will be more than 30 billion, since 2007, the domestic new MOCVD (metal organic chemical vapor deposition equipment) of about 40 units, more than 100 of the purchase plan.

However, to achieve the breakthrough of the upstream industry of LED, there are still many problems: first, the core technology with innovation, independent intellectual property rights or less, it is difficult to compete with foreign counterparts. Two domestic LED epitaxy, chip many research results are difficult to promote the application in the enterprise. Three is the domestic LED epitaxy, chip enterprise scale is too small, lack of R & D strength, high product cost, lack of competitiveness. Four is the development of upstream LED industry in our country in the process of region, fight the enemy separately to repeat construction, mutually closed, vicious competition, there is an urgent need to solve.

In order to speed up the implementation of the LED fundamental breakthrough of the upstream industry, promote the healthy growth of the whole industry, according to China's current situation and problems of LED upstream industry, the government should increase support and control capabilities, integration of dispersed research institutions repeated adjustment, focusing on core technologies with independent intellectual property rights and innovation project, through the guidance and macro-control measures LED, centralized resources to expand the scale of the upstream industry. In addition, we should strengthen the basic research and development of LED technology, make great efforts to support the localization of key equipment and basic raw materials, and accelerate the development of upstream LED epitaxy, chip professionals.

Source: China Electronics News