Osram Morphs from Lightbulbs to Optoelectronics

　　Aldo Kamper’s seven-year career as CEO of Osram Opto Semiconductors neatly overlaps the transformation of parent company Osram over the last decade.

　　Osram, a German company once known in the United States for Sylvania light bulbs (Osram GmbH acquired GTE’s Sylvania lighting division in 1993), identifies itself today as a “tech company.” Highlighting its light source technologies, Osram is driving R&D projects into such diverse fields as illumination, sensing and visualization.

　　If its booth at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month was any indication, Osram is a core light-source supplier to lidars that analyze vehicles’ surroundings and a provider of headlights that shine the road ahead but can automatically adjust intensity to prevent blinding oncoming vehicles or pedestrians. Osram also provides lights for iris scanning and facial recognition in smart phones, and provides sensors embedded in wearable devices.

　　While Kamper isn’t claiming credit for the parent company’s transition, he knows that basic semiconductor technologies and their devices — developed and manufactured by his own division Opto Semiconductors — have been critical to Osram’s recent growth.

　　After successfully divesting its lamps business, Osram GmbH — with 4 billion euro earnings in FY 2017 — last year generated revenues from three business units: Opto Semiconductors (1.7 billion euros), Specialty Lighting (2.3 billion euros) and Lighting Solutions and Systems (1.0 billion euros).

　　Today, Osram Opto Semiconductors (Regensburg, Germany) is the world's second largest manufacturer of optoelectronic semiconductors after Japan’s Nichia.

　　In a one-on-one interview with EE Times during CES, Kamper, who took over at Osram Opto Semiconductors in 2010 at the age of 40, showed no signs of boredom after seven years in the same division. Instead, the youthful-looking Kamper talked much like a kid in a candy store, still awe-struck by the potential of various optoelectronic applications in everyday life.

　　A Dutch native, Kamper joined Osram in 1994 after graduating from the University of Limburg. He spent two years — between 1997 and 1999 — in California at Stanford University’s graduate school of business earning an MBA. After two years in Silicon Valley’s technological hothouse, Kamper thought: “There is no way I’m going back to a lightbulb company.”

　　Fortunately, Kamper didn’t have to find a new job at a chip company in Silicon Valley, because the lightbulb company was catching the high-tech bug. The Opto Semiconductors team became an integral part of Osram’s light bulb-to-tech revolution.

　　Today, 50 percent of Opto Semiconductors’ revenue comes from the automotive sector. The rest of the Opto Semiconductors’ business derives from the consumer sector where optoelectronics is applied to everything from wearable devices to signal generations. Having two sectors to lean on by “going back and forth between them” is a good thing, according to Kamper. It proves that “we are not a one-trick pony.”

　　Opto Semiconductors’ product portfolio includes high-performance light-emitting diodes (LEDs) — designed for automotive and general lighting applications — miniature LEDs for mobile devices, as well as infrared diodes (IRED), semiconductor lasers and detectors.

　　Manufacturing is the key

　　Osram’s rapid growth couldn’t have happened and wouldn’t continue without the company’s intense R&D and ability for cost-efficient production, according to Kamper. “After all, we are in the cost-intensive game for semiconductors,” he said.

　　Case in point: Last November, Osram opened a new plant in Kulim, Malaysia. The German company believes it will be “the world's largest LED factory using 6-inch wafers.”

　　But wait. If Osram Opto Semiconductors is indeed in the semiconductor business, shouldn’t the company be fabless?

　　Other than Intel, your typical chip company in Silicon Valley these days is fabless. Fab ownership is not just frowned upon. It simply doesn’t make sense, because of the cost-prohibitive capital investment required for chip companies to build fabs. Outsourcing semiconductor production to a foundry like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) is the norm, freeing chip vendors’ resources to spend on more R&D.

　　Asked why Opto has its own fab, Kamper explained that the fabless theory does not apply to optoelectronics. For LED chips, product differentiation lies in each company’s proprietary process for manufacturing chips. “Epitaxy growth is the first step, which is such a vital early portion of chip fabrication that can define the core elements of the LED chips,” Kamper said.

　　With Kulim up and running, Osram now has a global network of three chip fabs. Two others are in Penang and Regensburg. This group of fabs allows Osram to cover a range of LED chip technologies including blue, green, white, red, orange, yellow and infrared, as well as surface and volume emitters.

　　The Kulim operation is notable for two reasons. First, it marks Osram’s transfer of its epitaxy stage of production outside of Germany. No other major LED chip farms out epitaxy.

　　Second, the Kulim plant will be the first to combine all production steps involved in chip manufacturing — from epi growth to wafers — under one roof. “We will have an in-house control over the full value chain,” said Kamper. “This lets us optimize our components better.”

　　Osram invested a total of 370 million euros in the first stage of the Kulim fab. It plans to expand in two additional stages, investing up to a billion euros for the whole expansion including LED assembly capacities, according to the company.

　　No foundries for LED chip vendors

　　Is there any equivalent to TSMC in the world of optoelectronics? Is anyone offering foundry services for LED chip suppliers?

　　There is none.

　　It’s almost ironic that TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor foundry, once made a serious attempt to enter the LED chip business in 2009. But, by January 2015, the company tacitly admitted defeat, pulling the plug and selling out to Epitstar in Taiwan.

　　At the time of the 2009 announcement, TSMC promised to “develop LED technology on silicon wafers to capitalize on silicon's ultra-low thermal resistance and potential for integrating LEDs with integrated circuit (IC) functionality.” TSMC’s strategy called for LED chip and packaging processes to be executed at the wafer level (eight-inch silicon wafer), rather than on individual LED chips. TSMC discussed its plan to integrate process steps from epi growth, chip formation and packaging to lens molding and complete processes at the wafer level.

　　In the end, none of these grand plans panned out. Meanwhile, LED chip vendors have continued to develop their own secret sauce for proprietary process technology, just as Osram Opto Semiconductors has done.

　　Osram’s automotive heritage

　　Osram Opto Semiconductors holds its “automotive heritage” dear to its heart.

　　When BMW first used blue backlight for its vehicle’s information clusters, “lighting became cool” for OEMs, tier ones and drivers alike, explained Kamper. LED lights moved further into the interior and exterior of vehicles in the form of tail lights and headlamps.

　　At one point, HID (high-intensity discharge) lamps were heavily as vehicles’ main lighting systems. But in the end, HID failed to take the world by storm with a penetration ratio that never exceeded 15 percent. In contrast, the growth of LED lamps in vehicles has steadily grown, said Kamper.

　　One of the most exciting new developments in the headlamp space is Adaptive Driving Beam (ADB). OEMs, tier ones and light source technology suppliers are pitching it in Europe and Japan. ADB is designed to adjust the lights automatically, when onboard cameras sense oncoming vehicles or pedestrians. ADB either dims individual LEDs in the lamp or shifts the beam down and sideways.

　　With the emergence of ADB, drivers can leave their lights always on high beam to provide maximum lighting. Kamper said ADB technology is also spawning “new applications and more features.” With ADB’s higher luminance, ADB-equipped vehicles can detect outlines of obstacles on the road or even read road signs.

　　Vehicles’ window as a display

　　Beyond ADB, LEDs can be also leveraged to project an image onto a vehicle’s windows, according to Kamper. “Windows could essentially become low-resolution displays. Projected images or messages can be used to interact with pedestrians,” he added.

　　Among other LED-related applications for vehicles, LED cameras can monitor a driver. If it finds the driver inattentive, LEDs can suddenly light up the steering wheel as a warning.  LED lighting can also enhance comfort inside vehicles.

　　LED lighting for vehicles is only the tip of the iceberg. Practically every vehicle today has IR laser, said Kamper. IR laser’s uses range from “cameras, rain sensor wipes and all the way to powerful lidars,” he added.

　　Osram’s high-power infrared pulse lasers have been featured in cars for time-of-flight (TOF) measurements in adaptive cruise control (ACC) systems and automatic braking systems. The next big thing for Osram lasers, however, is lidar applications. Osram’s extremely efficient, high-power infrared pulse laser of short pulse length is said to enable lidar systems to operate at high optical powered levels to realize large detection ranges, while still being safe for the naked eye.

　　Osram invests in lidar expert LeddarTech

　　Last July, Osram acquired a 25.1 percent share in LeddarTech, a Canadian developer of a proprietary lidar technology integrated into semiconductors and sensor modules for self-driving cars and ADAS.

　　Asked why Osram invested in LeddarTech, Kamper said, “The world needs to make more reliable lidars available at different price points for different markets.” Osram invested in LeddarTech, thinking that backing up LeddarTech might help the adoption of Osram’s highly-efficient infrared lasers with 905nm wavelength as the “standard” for certain types of lidars.

　　Kamper said that lasers with 905nm wavelength could pave the way for a new laser emitter technology — above 1,400-nm wavelength. Industry analysts say that the laser in the new wavelength promises to bring to lidars higher resolution and longer range. Practically every lidar company including Princeton Lightwave (bought by Ford), Continental (through its acquisition of ASC), and Luminar Technologies are all working on new laser emitter technology.