*** LED industry hits patented technology

LED industry according to its manufacturing process, can generally be divided into upstream epitaxial growth, midstream chip production and downstream packaging in three stages, there is a most upstream substrate manufacturers, usually sapphire substrate, also includes CREE's unique secrets of silicon carbide substrate.

The epitaxial wafers must be produced by MOCVD equipment. Without MOCVD equipment, it means only LED pellets packaging manufacturers. The MOCVD equipment is monopolized by AXITRON, VEECO, and SunRice. The Japanese manufacturers usually produce their own MOCVD equipment, and very few of them buy solar acid. There are two types of MOCVD: one is red and yellow light, also called four yuan; the other is blue-green light, called three yuan. The red and yellow light is mainly used to produce LED for character display, large-screen display, etc. There is no technical threshold. The blue-green light undergoes special surface processing such as coating a special formula phosphor, which can change from blue light to white light. Most electronic products such as laptops, TVs, and mobile phones use LEDs as their backlight source. Those so-called LED TVs are used. LEDs that are not backlighted by CCFLs are very different from OLED TVs.

White LED is a complex patent dispute. Japan Nichia first invented a white light patent. The five major companies, Nichia, Osram, ToyodaGosei, Cree, and Lumileds, almost controlled the entire white LED industry. Here, the patent is intensive, and it can be said that there are many minefields in China. No company has patented white LEDs.

All LED lighting must be white light, whether it is a flashlight, street lamp or desk lamp, and all backlights must be white light, which means that there is no LED manufacturer in China that can produce LEDs for backlighting of lighting and electronic products and can only do Low-tech billboards or red-yellow LEDs because none of them have patents for white LEDs.

In addition, all lighting LED particles in China are imported, mainly imported from Cree, which has a packaging base in Huizhou. All electronic products use LED particles for backlighting. All these so-called LED lighting manufacturers in the mainland are just doing system integration, packaging, making PCB boards, and making a shell. The technical content is basically zero.

Nichia Chemical, the world’s largest LED company, announced its 2012 results. In 2012, the company’s revenue was 6.8% year-on-year, or approximately US$3.2 billion, which is more than three times the revenue of all LED Epistar’s companies in China. The total profit of Nichia is about US$900 million, which is 10 times that of all wafer companies in mainland China. If government subsidies are not calculated, it will be 40 times. Nichia Chemical's debt ratio is only 7.6%, and the debt-to-equity ratio of LED companies in mainland China is above 60%. Nichia has been ranked first in the world for 13 years since it invented the blue LED in 1999, and mainland Chinese companies have fallen behind Japan and Asia for at least 50 years.

The story of Shuji Nakamura, the father of white LEDs, is deeply thought. The four countries are the smallest and poorest of Japan’s four islands. The island has a second-tier national university in Japan, Tokushima University. In 1973, Shuji Nakamura came to this school and spent six years earning a master's degree in electrical engineering. Due to the poor reputation of the school, Nakamura couldn't enter a top-tier company like Sony and eventually went down to a Japanese company called Nichia Chemical, a small company producing phosphors in the Shikoku region. Three years later, Shuji Nakamura published an article: A novel metalorganic chemical vapor deposition method for the growth of gallium nitride.

The publication of the paper has caused a sensation in the world's semiconductor industry and the scientific community. It should be noted that at that time, many large companies and famous university research institutes all over the world were in a headache for the preparation of semiconductor blue light source film materials. In the absence of assistants and experimental assistants, Nakamura overcomes two major material preparation problems in just four years: one is the growth of a high-quality GaN film; the other is GaN hole conduction. Regulation. Nakamura Shuji benefited nearly 20.0 billion yen for Nichia Chemical, not including future and other company-authorized patent revenues. Nichia became the world's LED giant in one fell swoop, but Nichia Chemical only paid him a reward of 20,000 yen. In 1999, Nakamura left the company and asked Japan for 60 billion yen in compensation. In 2005, the two sides settled with 840 million yen.