The lights are shining bright on Billerica, Mass.-based Luminus Devices.

The maker of light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, pulled in $72 million in its latest round of financing, and the company plans to use that cash to move into new applications for its products.

The funding was led by Boston's Braemar Energy Ventures and included San Francisco-based CMEA Ventures and Washington, D.C.-based Paladin Capital Group, as well as other funds and all of Luminus' previous investors.

Luminus makes LEDs which are designed to be much brighter than traditional LEDs, calling the product PhlatLights, after the photonic lattice technology it's based on.

The company's LEDs are already being used in things like projection televisions as well as pocket projectors, a handy device for road warriors that some other LED firms, like San Jose, Calif.'s YLX, are also targeting (see LEDs, fuel cells grab the gold in Beijing).

Energy efficient, and environmentally friendly, lighting is a growing sector, with some significant LED competition from companies like Durham, N.C.'s Cree (Nasdaq: CREE) and Fairfield, Conn.-based lighting giant General Electric (NYSE: GE).

GE recently demonstrated a roll-to-roll manufacturing process for organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs (see GE shows how to roll out OLEDs).

But the new funding for Luminus means it can move into more specialized lighting fields that it says traditional LEDs can't compete in, including medical devices and stage lighting.

Talking about it all with Cleantech.com is John Langevin, VP of sales and marketing at Luminus, who said the company's first new product announcement would probably coincide with the Lightfair trade show in May.

What's the background of the company?

The company started in August 2002. The founder of our company (Alexei Erchak) did his PhD work at MIT, and it involved the use of photonic crystals, or photonic lattice technology, to extract light more efficiently out of LEDs.

The work that he did at MIT became the foundation for our business here. At the time the company was started, we actually got an exclusive license from MIT to use this core technology in our LED products.

And since then we've built the business, and the business has been using this photonic lattice technology to make larger, more powerful and more efficient LEDs than any other LEDs in the world.

The focus of our business for the last few years has been in the projection and display business. We have red, green and blue LEDs that are used as a light source in Samsung DLP types of televisions, and also a number of what are called "pocket projectors," which are LED-based projectors.

Are the pocket projectors out in the field or is that something you're working on?

They're just starting to emerge now. LG was our first customer, they launched a product last year.

There actually have been LED projectors on the market for a couple of years, using traditional LEDs, and those projectors had brightnesses anywhere between 20 and 50 lumens. Which is marginally useful. They were interesting novelty products, but they were marginally useful.

The LG projector, from LG Electronics in Korea, was launched last year using one of our chipsets and it was the first projector to break the 100 lumen barrier.

Now that's more than twice the brightness of these other projectors that were out there and now this is becoming a useful product, for both business and consumer use.

And what we're going to see in 2008 is more products.

At the CES show, the Consumer Electronics Show in January, we had a suite where we had four different projectors that were demonstrated, all using our PhlatLight technology. And we even have more customers that are planning on launching products this year.

So I think it's an emerging application that you're going to start to see more of this year.

And now you're expanding into the lighting area?

Exactly. So as our business is evolving, we started with projection TV, and then got into these LED front projectors, the next thing that we're attacking is backlighting of LCD televisions and monitors using our PhlatLight technology.

But I think what's most significant coming out of this investment is the demand for our technology to be used for other solid-state lighting applications. Not so much display applications, which is what the focus of our company had been.

And there are certain applications that are particularly well suited to our technology that can't be done with other LEDs.

And these opportunities were the value in the investment in our company in this last round of financing, and these funds are going to be used to help accelerate the development of a number of products for that space.

What kind of things are you looking at?

I mentioned LCD TV backlighting, which is something that we're doing, and I think we're going to see our first customers launching products late 2008, early 2009.

And this would be replacing the CCFL lamps (cold cathode fluorescent lamps) that are currently used to backlight these televisions, replacing them with a red, green and blue LED chipset.

The uniqueness of our solution is, because our LEDs are particularly large and high-powered and very bright, you can backlight a large TV with a very small number of LEDs.

As a reference point, we demonstrated a 46 inch television at the CES show that we backlight with eight red, green and blue chipsets. Other companies using traditional LEDs, it requires over 2,000 RGB chipsets.

Continue to page 2 ...