The exceptional 15W OSRAM OSTAR Stage RGBW is one of today’s most widely used multi-chip LED emitters. OSRAM has always closely collaborated with its innovative and responsive customers to identify their needs and develop great solutions.
With feedback from preferred customers like Ayrton, OSRAM optimized the Ostar SMT in the current four color form. (Ayrton was one of the first to bring an OSTAR Stage based fixture to market, in the Wildsun™500S, a powerful wash light. This was followed by a whole family of beam-projector luminaires, like the award winning MagicPanel™602). OSRAMs customer policy has paid off: since the OSTAR Stage was launched two years ago, the world’s biggest manufacturers of moving luminaires have switched over to this SMT LED component: Ayrton, Clay Paky, GLP, JB-Lighting, Martin, etc.
How did the OSRAM OSTAR Stage come into being and what makes this LED different from the competition? We decided to ask the German manufacturer’s technology and marketing team. They were happy to answer our questions.
The headquarters of OSRAM Opto Semiconductors is in Regensburg, Germany. We went there with Yvan Peard, founder and CEO of Ayrton and Antoine Leveau, Sales Manager for OSRAM West Europe. The company’s sole focus over the last 40 years has been on developing a variety of Optoelectronic components for all types of market, as evidenced by thousands of international patents filed under its name.
OSRAM Opto Semiconductors in Regensburg
We were met by Marion Reichl, Media Relations Manager, who organized a meeting with the technical and marketing staff and a visit to one of the four chip production facilities.
A world leader in LED technology
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During the meeting, Michael Wohs, Vice President, Sales, Europe & Emerging Markets, with 2013 sales figures in hand, told us that OSRAM Opto Semiconductors’ was one of the leading manufacturers of optoelectronic semiconductors in the world. The company is the sales leader in the automotive industry, in optical sensors, and industrial lighting and is in the top five in sales of urban, industrial and domestic lighting. It ranks in the top two suppliers for the projection and stage lighting industry. The company generated over €1 billion in sales for 2013 (up from €899 million in 2012). This represents 18% of OSRAM’s total turnover.
Osram Opto semiconductors employs a staff of more than 7,300 worldwide and has three production sites: Regensburg in Germany (~ 2,000), Penang, Malaysia (~ 5,000), and the new 100,000 square meter facility in Wuxi, China, which opened in early summer 2014. The company expects to employ up to 2000 more people by 2017.
Customer support, marketing strategy, quality assurance, procurement, human resources and purchasing, are integrated at “Application Centers” located in the US (Sunnyvale, California and Northville, Michigan), China (Hong Kong, Shanghai, Wuxi), Japan (Yokohama), and Europe (Regensburg).
OSRAM Opto Semiconductors has a shared#2 in the market for packaged LEDs
OSRAM Opto Semiconductors’s turnover evolution from 2010 to 2013
The company has undergone a startling evolution, from the first radial LED in 1977, used as a simple red or yellow indicator light, to the innovative blue LED with SiC technology in 1988, and then to the first soldered surface-mounted LED in 1990. OSRAM also beat the world record for efficacy the 2008 with a white LED generating 136 lumens / Watt, (lm/W), at 350mA, and again in 2011 with a warm white LED at 142lm/W. The manufacturer is also one of the first to have perfected 6-inch epitaxial wafers, remaining competitive in a highly aggressive market.
An OSRAM employee shows the new wafer size: left- a new 6 inch wafer, right – the conventional 4 inch wafer
With 40 years of experience and know-how and awards to prove it has mastered all phases of LED manufacturing, OSRAM Opto Semiconductors invests more than 10% of annual turnover in R&D. It also explains why this company holds thousands of international patents and reinforces its world-class position in technology and quality—the company is indeed growing faster than the market.
A small part of the Osram Opto Semiconductors museum with the first Radial LED.
Antoine Leveau told us : “Today, in 2014, we have already reached 150lm/W, with a potential from 180 to 210lm/W, depending on the color temperatures. OSRAM has already gone beyond the potential of many other light sources, including metal halide.
The use of LEDs is already widespread, and let’s not forget some of its more interesting features such as resistance to shock and vibration, which simplifies transport, the absence of fragile filaments, and a greater life expectancy than with traditional lamps…
We have a very strong position in conversion technology for LEDs and lasers, as OSRAM has always used them (phosphors) in lamps and fluorescent tubes.
They are similar to the types of phosphors used in making white LEDs. They are covered in the patents we hold and also are strongly tied to the manufacture of chips and their encapsulation. This has allowed us to hold our strong IP position as well as sign licensing agreements with various other important market players.”
A new converter mix that OSRAM is currently testing in its development laboratory provides a pleasant warm white light.
Osram, in all the LED markets
Wolfgand Lex (Vice-Président & General Manager Visible LED) emphasizes just how much LEDs have become a part of our daily lives with this piece of trivia: “Do you know how many LEDs you encounter in one day from the moment you get up in the morning until bedtime ?
By the time you’re done with breakfast, you have already seen 27 LEDs just by using your appliances. Then you can count 15 more in your car. A single traffic light is made up of 15 LEDs, and there are several hundred in a highway traffic sign. You arrive at your workplace. Then there’s the lift, your computer screen, and your mobile phone… In other words, by sunset you will have come across 140,000 LEDs if you live in a large European city and certainly many more if you are in Asia.
all the LED apps we meet during a day
Osram Opto Semiconductors application areas
Since 1990, OSRAM Semiconductors’ turnover has doubled and the LED market continues to create new applications. By transporting photons, we transport emotions—and in color.
Osram estimates based on McKinsey Report 2012
Stefan Morgott, Senior Expert in Application, helps our customers optimize use of our LEDs and orients them toward solutions that they have never even dreamed of.
This service is the key to our business model because we are not limiting ourselves merely to selling as many LEDs as possible. A close relationship with the customer is really essential for doing business.
We are the only ones to provide the full spectrum of light colors – and additionally infrared light—efficiently and in a compact format. We are amongst the biggest manufacturers worldwide to cover all important lighting markets.”
Birth of the OSTAR Stage RGBW
When it comes to stage lighting, the OSRAM OSTAR Stage LED is clearly the industry leader. Wolfgang Schnabel (Marketing Manager Industry & Visible LED) has shown us that the quest for efficiency focuses primarily on light projection applications and notably the miniature video projectors, or being integrated into mobile phones, among others. Moreover, there is a full synergy between the applications, as you might guess.
Wolfgang Schnabel : “ The study of projection applications started in 2002. We had a 4x1mm2 lightsource that could be used in LED projection, that time in big size projector cases, but with only 25 lumens. This was a start in 2005, and further on we developed a complete portfolio around this LED, because we needed higher output. For example, today, only nine years later, LED projectors achieve more than 1000 lumens. Using a diffrent OSRAM OSTAR for another application the projectors can be incorporated into phones.
The OSRAM Opto Semiconductors Headquarters
During projection, they encounter a problem called “etendue.” This is a characteristic of a projector’s optical system that determines how much area (mm²) and respective luminous flux from an LED source you can actually project onto the wall. Etendue is a fixed relationship, which never decreases, in any optical system. Our product was developed to offer the best possible etendue for a certain image size. The same problem exists with stage lighting systems.
So we developed and promoted our OSRAM OSTAR Projection (RGGB) product to help stage lighting customers solve the problem of zooming the LED. At that time, the minimum spot angle they could obtain with an LED source was around 18°. Using our source instead, they were able to reduce this to 9° and double the light in this smaller area. This was only possible because we covered our chips with a flat glass instead of silicone, to preserve the etendue. All of the other competitors at that time used silicon encapsulation on top, which destroys the etendue of the chip.
Suddenly people like Yvan at Ayrton came to us and said: ‘your LED line is very good. It offers optic benefits, but one color is missing.’ So they asked us to build the RGBW. This was the real starting point. From then on we produced OSRAM OSTAR Stage (RGBW), red, green, blue and white. That’s our history: and so we were involved in both projection and stage lighting.
But we are not only talking about projection and stage lighting: We now have a medical product using OSTAR technology, which is a multi color LED source achieving a very high CRI, and our OSTAR products found the way to the automotive industry. Today we are creating headlamps for cars, and we have a similar wide portfolio for the whole industry. We have used the synergy of our OSTAR technology package in all areas.
SLU : What more is Ayrton asking you to do ?
Wolfgang Schnabel : They are asking us to double or triple the power of the current models. This is currently a 15W package, but they are asking for a 45W package. We are following Ayrton’s request, because Yvan Peard is very creative. He’s very innovative. He has one product idea after the other and he is always asking, ‘can you do this? Can you do that?”.
SLU : So, is Yvan the best in his field ?
Wolfgang Schnabel : I would say that he is the most creative and the quickest. […] Sometimes he had product ideas that he worked on for three years, and he was always ahead of the technology. When finally we were able to develop a source he needed, he could then go back to projects he’d thought of years ago. He is very, very creative. I just wanted to show you an example of the projector inside this phone…”
Using a mobile phone from a distance of about 1.5m, Wolfgang Schnabel projected a video onto the 60cm x 45cm wall of the meeting room, and the result was very bright, and with very good contrast. Really impressive!
Wolfgang Schnabel : “Even here where it is not very dark, you can get quite a nice picture… I can even do a presentation with slides directly from this phone. This phone has been on the market for a year and a half. All of this is incorporated into a phone, but this clearly requires a very efficient LED. What this means for Ayrton is that, as we work on the efficiency of our LEDs, we are continually developing more efficient systems with more output, using less power. Our whole current product range for entertainment and projection uses this same technology.”
SLU : How can you increase efficiency ?
Wolfgang Schnabel : Basically, we buy substrates from vendors. Then we are doing the epitaxy, where we structure the chip, process it, and put it into a package and the result is that today we have 55% output efficiency with a white 1mm² LED. We will never get 100%, because one hundred percent efficiency would be like a perpetual mobile. But we work to eliminate the losses. We are working on better epitaxial design. We work on reducing extraction losses from the chip by improving the chip’s surface design. There are also electrical losses, like contact and resistance, so we work on the contact design. No one knows how close we can get to 100%. But every step toward100% helps the application either to save energy or getting brighter. So it is crucial to work on the technology.”
What distinguishes OSTAR Stage products from the rest of the market?
Antoine Leveau talked about the advanced technology that went into the OSRAM OSTAR Stage: “We’ve developed specific color wavelengths that allow us to obtain very good saturation for scenic applications. Another feature supported by our chips’ clean technology is their surface emission: more than 95% of the light is emitted towards the top of the chip and not to the sides, unlike the competition. This makes it possible to use the center of the chip itself and endows it with incomparable optical properties.
The exceptional 15W OSRAM OSTAR Stage RGBW. You can see its flat glass surface that allows an optimized flow extraction
We have developed a flat glass surface to protect the semiconductor that allows not only very good coupling with secondary optics but also optimized flow extraction. The stage lighting market requires a very tight beam and, ideally, very effective zoom dynamics. Thanks to the flat optics, the chip yields the most faithful image possible, and the ratio between the size of the chip and the secondary optic, i.e. the collimator, is the lowest possible. We still need to protect the semiconductor, usually either with resin or with a ceramic casing, and there are various technologies available in terms of material.
Our OSTAR Stage is exposed to the air, protected only by a glass surface. This saves changing the index between the different environments. The light emitted by the chip travels through the air, then the glass, and the air once again, before reaching the plastic of the secondary optics. And if we had used resin (common in approximately 99.5% of components produced worldwide), there would be a loss of luminous flux and emission toward the sides, hence less efficiency. This is why our OSTAR Stage is quite successful.
SLU : What binning* do you guarantee your customers ?
* Binning : The sorting of both chips and finished LED packages by a color and brightness group in order to maintain color consistency within a finished product. Each LED can be tested for specific characteristics such as luminous intensity, luminous flux, forward voltage, dominant wavelength and chromaticity. Upon completion of assembly, LEDs are measured for brightness and color and then placed into “bins” according to their intensity group and their color group. The binned LEDs are then placed onto reels for shipment. –
See more at http://LEDlight.OSRAM-os.com/technology/fine-white-binning/#sthash.qQ8Jrelg.dpuf
Antoine Leveau : They have a choice. In the Stage application for Ayrton for example, we deliver well-defined binning to meet their need for consistency: wavelength mono bin for blue, green and white because red is less sensitive, and flux mono bin on the red and white. We also produced two to three flux groups on the green and blue.
This optimizes Ayrton’s an optimum response in terms of the production process and ensures delivery of a fairly low number of configurations. With a four-color mix, there is always a problem of making the products homogeneous. The requirement is that all the luminaires produced have good color response. If a customer needs to add to his fleet of fixtures, the new models will have the same color and flux characteristics as the ones that were supplied maybe a year before.
SLU : At an extra cost, obviously ?
Antoine Leveau : Yes, because this is the customer’s choice. Ayrton anticipated this need, and the discussions I had with Yvan Peard helped establish this system in Germany.
SLU : Do all your customers who manufacture stage projectors choose this option ?
Antoine Leveau : Some have found another solution and others have a work-around using different calibration systems. Everyone finds what works best for him
SLU : What percentage of variation are we talking about ?
Antoine Leveau : We make wavelength groups with a 3-nm gap and flux groups of ±11%. There are thus very few software corrections to implement. In one delivery, the characteristics of a component are very accurate with a single color bin and a single flux bin. In one reel delivered, there is one single component characteristic. Then from one delivery to the next, there may be a small variance which will be corrected by the product software.”
Power increase
The new OSRAM OSTAR Projection Compact 2×2 version for projection applications expand the performance range at the low and high ends. OSRAM OSTAR Projection Compact is ideal for pico projector applications, whereas it is designed for applications in high-power projectors such as those in home cinema systems and mobile projection systems
To meet the demand for a greater luminous flux, OSRAM has developed a new diode called the OSRAM OSTAR Projection Compact.
Antoine Leveau : “The OSRAM OSTAR Projection Compact meets this requirement for more and more flux. We must increase the efficiency with greater light extraction and this is a thoroughly technological issue, so we are doubling the size of the chips.
The Ostar Projection Compact is a 2mm2 chip per color as compared to 1mm2 for the Stage, which will respond to other stage luminaire applications. When we double the surface of a chip, we quadruple its capacity in terms of current, which produces more flux. Finally, the same response must occur on the optical chain. If the flux is higher, it has to be used effectively by the optical chain, whether for an interface with secondary optics or a mixer according to the application.
SLU : What happens to the thermal drift in terms of flux and colorimetry ?
Antoine Leveau : This is an important point. We are working on optimizing the thermal resistance of our component enclosures. We are already 20% lower in thermal resistance than the competition. For our customers this means saving 20% in the sizing of materials and in energy expended to extract heat. This is not negligible. Our solution is the choice of materials.
On the ceramics we use, we solder the chips on their substrate rather than glue them. This makes for optimal heat extraction. Sometimes this choice of materials is more costly, but the solution meets the needs of our customers. Often, people only look at the initial flux and don’t take into account all the related parameters. You can decide to use one type of silicone for the best possible light extraction, but this choice could impact the life expectancy or persistence of the color
SLU : Has this technology been used in the OSRAM OSTAR Stage ?
Antoine Leveau : Yes of course. We know that these products are confined to very small environments. They have to be fairly simple to implement. And since these products can be used for video projection and integrated into mobile phones, you can be sure that we’re not trying to squeeze a giant aluminum radiator inside (laughing)! Lowering thermal resistance is a permanent challenge for our R&D department.
SLU : Any other innovations ?
Antoine Leveau : We are working on a “Converted Green” which consists of depositing green phosphor on a blue LED. We obtain a green light by secondary emission whose spectral characteristics shows a peak in the blue range and a significant rebound effect in the green. This is not a saturated color with a very narrow peak but with wide green coverage. The flux is almost twice as high.
This is useful, either for an application involving mirrors and therefore a loss of flux, or for an application that requires more flux for less power and heat.
We have gone over to thin-film for the AlInGaP technology and we are using UX3 technology, with a better injection of current into the chip. This achieves greater stability when hot. So we decrease the flux variations between cold and hot with purely a surface emission that is always optimized for more efficiency.”
Visiting a chip production facility
Marion Reichl offered us a guided tour of one of the production facilities, notably where epitaxy is carried out. This is the initial stage of structuring the chip: depositing layers of semiconductors on substrate. Epitaxy, the growing achievement of 40 years of experience, is performed only in Germany.
We could only see the machines from a distance, down a corridor protected by glass. This floor was occupied by a huge white room where technicians wore antistatic clothing and sometimes full-coverage outfits that were color-coded to differentiate between the men and the women.
The building had three levels, with two production floors separated by a floor reserved for air-renewal filtration systems and gas containers used in epitaxy. We spoke to Johannes Völkl, Director LED Production. Seeing that we were disappointed in being denied access, he explained just how clean this room was, he commented.
Johannes Völkl : The cleanroom class” is 100—this means that there are less than 100 particles bigger that ½ micron in one cubic foot of air. In reality, if the machinery is working properly, we should have less than 10. This is continuously being monitored.
This cleanroom has holes at the top and bottom so that clean air can flow in through the top and take all the dust and remove it through the other holes. Then the air crosses a double-layered floor, comes up and passes through a number of filters. It is condensed and evaporated several times and then mixed with fresh air. This means we completely change the air in the room six times every hour.
SLU : What is the chip production process?
Johannes Völkl : We bring in the sapphire wafers from outside and make several thin layers on them to produce the light. It is basically a p–n junction, but actually much more complicated. For these tiny layers we need huge, expensive machines.
The key is that no oxygen is involved. There is no vacuum because we need certain gases to react to form the layers. We use ammonia, which is nitrogen mixed with hydrogen, and also gallium or indium with hydrogen. We bring these gases together and place them on the hot surface of the wafers.
The hydrogen is removed and the gallium and the nitrogen stick to the wafers. It is very simple. Not easy, but simple. The problem is removing the hydrogen. It is very difficult to remove the hydrogen and leave the gallium and nitrogen. Then we have to mix very small amounts of other gases to form the light emitter.
The LED production steps
An epitaxy machine is made of five segments: One is for temperature control; two segments are gas cabinets (the gases enter from the bottom into these cabinets where the mixing occurs); another is the reactor segment; and the fifth is the “handkerchiefs” segment, which the operator opens to place the wafers on the plate. Then the plate is transferred to the reactor.
An OSRAM employee places 6 inch wafers manually in a plate for a coating unit
The reactor rotates, the gasses enter, and it heats up to a temperature between 600°C and 1000°C. On the wafer you obtain a layer, and in the center of the area is the light emitting area. For example, this can be based on gallium arsenide or gallium nitride.
It is very difficult to make it homogeneous, but I think we are among the best in the world at it. Our LEDs are very high quality with nearly no failure rate, and we are competing with the best. We have been making epitaxy for LEDs since 1970… I think we know our stuff! The layer itself has a thickness of 3-5 microns, or one–tenth the thickness of a hair.
On this layer you need to have contact so that current can flow from the front to the back. Therefore, we first need metals on these layers—special metals that can form a contact. Then there are more layers, and a final one for soldering.
Warm white light or cold white light can be produced depending on the ratio of the phosphors. A lab technician at OSRAM Opto Semiconductors carefully weighs the different phosphors
LEDs are automatically encapsulated in the LED assembly of OSRAM Opto Semiconductors
This results in a complete wafer. Then this has to be cut. Some LEDs types are still cut with a blade that can split a human hair. The more recently developed LED types are now cut with lasers.We can cut across a very tiny distance, even a few micrometers away from the chip, and it is very stable and very straight. Each operator must sign off and comment on every operation being processed. This so that we can evaluate any production deviation. Over here you have the testing equipment for the layers, which uses lasers to measure the thickness of the layers.
An employee performs a visual check on the electrical connection between an LED and the substrate
A technician checks the crystal structure of a substrate material
We also have chemical machines that etch and clean the wafers. 50% of the success of the semiconductor production process is in cleanliness. We are one of the most environmentally friendly production sites. We have received prizes from the government for our high environmental protection rating. This is also true for our recycling of water, heat, air and metals. We recycle our exhaust heat.”
Quality control
Antoine Leveau satisfied our curiosity about quality assurance, which we assumed was strict.
Antoine Leveau : “We have implemented programs such as “Zero Tolerance To Defect” with the objective of applying this quality philosophy to all phases of component manufacturing, both in engineering as well as production. We take into account all elements that could affect our products. Today we are below 1 ppm at the production level (one product failure per million parts), so it is very low. Often, in conventional industry we often refer to about 100 ppm.
We consider that as either a direct initial failure or a flux variation (Vf) of ± 50% or 20%.
In the development cycle, we single out three production batches that we sample from. And on these samples, we then perform a qualification test: 1000h at 85°, 1000h with a thermal cycling from –40° to +85°, 1000h at 85° with 85% humidity. We also test their ability to be re-soldered five times. Thus we conduct a battery of tests beforehand to ensure that the product is reliable.
Then it is put into production. At the end of the process, we systematically test all of the nearly 10 billion components produced, twice. We perform two tests to verify the binnings and to ensure that they meet the specs on the data sheet. We then perform a rather complicated qualification procedure on our components. We subject them internally to stress tests using thermal cycles at high temperatures and levels of humidity. This is make sure that they will continue to function properly regardless of the application environment”
Armed with solid know-how and the ability to come up with new projects in new application environments for greater performance, OSRAM Opto Semiconductors is a future-oriented company that is always prepared for change. The company has therefore decided to invest in its industrial production capacity in Asia to maintain its competitive edge and respond to all types of markets. It wants to increase its output volume while placing a high premium on quality. Its customers, regardless of their market position and size, have expressed satisfaction with the company’s high level of service. Ayrton is perfect example
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