Seoul Viosys begins production of rare-earth-free white light emitter

The problem with outsourcing all your manufacturing so you can mildly increase profits and destroy any organized labor is that whoever you outsourced it to holds you hostage.

Any talk of this is just propaganda to sell weapons and increase the "defense" budget.

So gallium is a byproduct of bauxite mining but requires some sophistication. China produces 60% of the world's aluminum. India is the second largest producer but doesn't have the infrastructure to extract gallium. That will probably change. But it is a sophisticated process so you need an entire supply chain for that too. China has that. India does not (currently).

But India would avoid the geopolitical issues of being dependent on China or Russia.

Here they are somehow eliminating the need for phosphors for color conversion but they didn't say how.

I mean, if GaN is a problem we are already in a bad shape.

That could be done if the LED actually contains a multiple structure combining red, green and blue LEDs, but in the past such a combined LED had the disadvantage that in time the efficiency of the 3 components degraded at a different rate, which resulted in a color shift.

For now, the luminous efficiency of this LED is quite poor, unsuitable for lighting but only for indicator LEDs or display applications, but they claim that for such small LEDs even the traditional LEDs had poor efficiency and they hope to improve the efficiency later to more acceptable levels.

If they do not use a multiple LED structure but they still have a fluorescent conversion layer, the layer must be very thin and deposited on the top surface of the LED. It could consist of "quantum dots", like in some TV panels, i.e. very small crystals which emit light of a color depending on the composition and size of the nanocrystal when illuminated with ultraviolet or blue light.

However, "quantum dot" is a term that has already been used for a long time in marketing with the intention to suggest a superior technology. If they were using this, I expect that they would have bragged about it.

So from the wording of the press release I think that a multiple LED structure is more likely than a "quantum dot" conversion layer, even if the latter would provide both a better spectrum coverage and superior aging characteristics (by avoiding a color hue shift in old LEDs).

Where you really need white light with a continuous spectrum, there are very few alternatives to arc lamps.

Some time ago there were published some interesting research results, which suggested that it is possible for incandescent lamps to make a comeback, this time at a efficiency comparable with white LEDs. That could be achieved with a carbon filament in a gas mixture that prevents evaporation, where all the inner walls of the lamp are very good mirrors for infrared light, but the front window of the lamp has an optical filter that passes visible light, while reflecting infrared light.

Such an incandescent lamp could have a much better efficiency than an arc lamp, and also a longer life (the very low efficiency of the traditional incandescent lamps is due to most of the energy being lost as infrared light).

It remains to be seen whether that research can lead to commercial products.

> if the Company is suggesting it out of pure hype of AI mania.

IMHO, this is pretty transparently r&d for better? data transmission attached to the trend of the day that does a lot of data transmission. Where better is higher bandwidth, lower cost, etc.

AI is the current trendy thing, but better data transmission will always have applications.