In the past 4 years, UVC LED ultraviolet sterilization technology has been increasingly popularly applied to civil products. However, there have been and continue to be higher and higher demands from the market and users. The price of UV-C LEDs can vary greatly depending on wavelength characteristics, product quality, lifespan and germicidal capacity. So in the technology race of the giants in the UVC LED industry, who is gaining the advantage?
UVC LED Market Overview
For years, UVC LED suppliers have been racing against design-performance and cost-of-manufacturing metrics to take the lead in this potentially lucrative technology industry. Participating in the game are the big guys from developed countries, such as LG Innotek, Philips Signify, Osram, Violumas, Seoul Viosys… So how did they start and where are they now in the world's technology competition map?
LG Innotek with her big investment in UVC LED power race
At the end of 2017, LG Innotek announced that its R&D department had developed the world's first 100mW UVC LED after 2 years of research and development. UVC LED announced by LG is a product that emits ultraviolet light with a deep UV wavelength at 278 nanometers (nm). This result shows LG's great effort in the race for UVC LED performance. However, less than 3 years later, at the beginning of 2020, LG Innotek suddenly announced its abandonment of the LED research and development segment.
Philips Lighting (Signify) - over 35 years of UV research
With more than 35 years of investment in UV technology, including mercury and LED lamps, in July 2020, Signify suddenly announced that it would reduce its development focus on UVC LED and ramp up production for UVC mercury lamps.
This Signify's move is quite disappointing to industry experts because mercury lamps have the weakness of high operating temperature and are not environmentally friendly, while UVC LED lamps have a great advantage in small size and small energy, especially suitable for applications in hand-held civil products or small size requirements. Until now, Signify's products are still mainly using mercury bulbs, will Signify follow LG Innotek's footsteps and give up the race of UVC LED technology?
Other reputable Manufacturers in the World - Where are they in the race?
In addition to the big names mentioned above, many major UVC LED manufacturers from Europe - America - Japan - Korea - Taiwan - China are also active, they participate in the race and constantly research to promote the performance of its products.
YESLED, a well-known global LED portal site, lists UVC LED products produced by most of the suppliers. http://yesled.com/productsDetail.php?id=171&filter%5B6%5D=LED&column=8&order=asc
If we look at the UVC wavelength from 200nm - 280nm, and the product is a single LED (excluding arrays of multiple LEDs), it is not difficult to see that most of the current products on the market are with only 60mW or less.
This raises the questions of why commercial products are only popular at 60mW, while research in a few labs has already reached 100mW? Is it because the problem of high-power UVC LED production cost is too big a barrier for them to market? Or is it because of the operational stability risks of using UVC LED in commercial applications, which are often ignored for products in R&D testing process?
BOLB INC. USA, the pioneer of high power UVC LED for commercial markets
The R&D company, BOLB INC., based in Livermore, California, has announced that their UVC LED product is 100mW efficient, and more importantly, has passed mass production requirements in order to offer suitable costs for the consumer market.
In this technology race, in general, researchers are often troubled by UV efficiency, electricity consumption, and heat dissipation for UVC LED. BOLB says its UVC LED has completely solved the above technical problems. Not too much to assert, in the technology race up to now, BOLB INC USA is holding the leading position based on their well-known achievements.
Looking to the future, BOLB team has been in the progress of increasing the UVC LED capacity to 180mW, optimizing the technical and production conditions, to be able to offer more powerful products at a more reasonable cost to better meet market expectations.
The race of R&D has been, is and will continue to be extremely exciting and challenging. But it proves that UVC LED is an extremely valuable source of germicidal ingredients and formulas in the coming future. So is it time for R&D houses in Southeast Asia to kick off thinking about innovative products using UVC LED chips?
As a shareholder of BOLB INC., UVC TECH exclusively distributes and transfers UVC LED technology patented by BOLB to the Southeast Asian markets. The main areas of activity of UVC Tech include:
Consulting, R&D and providing sterilization technology solutions for all environments: air, water, and surfaces.
Provide UVC LED components for partners to design applications and products.
UVC TECH wishes to bring the most advanced technologies to the Southeast Asian markets, in order to create innovative, high-value products to protect people' health.