... back to page 1

What's the technological leap in your LEDs?

I mentioned the photonic lattice technology. The photonic lattice is a technology that's embedded inside the LED, and what it does is it allows for more efficient extraction of photons from the LEDs.

So, more electrons can get converted to photons more efficiently.

The photonic lattice also influences the way the photons are emitted out of the LED. With our technology photons emit from the surface of the LED, as opposed to conventional LEDs where most of the light comes from the edge.

If you can picture an LED — which would be kind of a square looking puck — for a traditional LED, light comes from the edges and is reflected up, versus ourLEDs, the light comes from the surface, which makes them very scalable to large sizes and different shapes.

When the light comes from the edge, the more you scale in size, the less efficient it becomes, because fewer photons are able to emit from the edge. And as a result, more photons are reabsorbed in the LED and become heat, as opposed to light. So these chips are not scalable to large sizes.

The uniqueness of our LEDs is that they're very large, which allows them to be very bright, which allows us to enable applications that just can't be enabled with traditional LEDs.

What types of things are you looking at?

Initially we're going to be looking at applications that benefit from having a single large LED as opposed to many small LEDs.

Some of those applications are in the medical field, where there are endoscopy-type scopes, where you have a very bright xenon-type lamp that's used today, and light is then distributed down a scope to a camera through a fiber optic cable.

These xenon lights are very bright, very hot, and the key is to be able to capture as much of this light into this small fiber bundle as possible.

In order to do that, you can't just take small LEDs and group them together, you have to be able to concentrate more light into a single point source, and that's an obviously nice application for our technology.

So that's one area we're getting into. A related application is called machine vision, where LEDs are used in industrial applications for lighting, for machine vision-type applications, where a bright pulse of light is needed to illuminate something for a short duration of time.

The entertainment space is particularly interesting for us. There's stage lighting. Lighting requirements that very bright, high-powered lights with wide color gamuts and good color rendering.

Today they use very bright types of xenon and metal-halide lamps, which have all the issues associated with these types of lamps, from a heat standpoint, from an environmental friendliness standpoint — some contain mercury. And very short lifetimes.

What we are able to do with our PhlatLight technology is, with a relatively small number of these LEDs, replace these lamps, resulting in fixtures with extraordinary wide color gamut, great color rendering, with a very long lifetime, and no environmental issues, no mercury.

How are you going to stack up against other players in the field, like Cree and GE?

We have a very unique product. If you look at a Cree chip, for instance, and compare it to ours, ours are significantly larger and significantly brighter.

And you're going to see us less in the space competing with traditional low-brightness LEDs, or even today what they call power-LEDs, which are in the one watt range.

That market is fairly well saturated and commoditized. What we are able to do is open up new applications that can't be addressed with traditional LEDs.

The stage lighting is a good example. Where LEDs just aren't bright enough to be suitable for that application with traditional LEDs and traditional optics. What you need to have is a very bright, single point source.

That's where the uniqueness of our technology will allow us to, not so much compete with traditional LEDs, but replace existing incandescent and fluorescent and high-intensity bulbs.

What's your manufacturing situation?

Traditionally, we've done all the manufacturing ourselves. We have our own semiconductor fab here (Billerica, Mass.). We make the LEDs here. We do all the packaging here.

And the packaging is very important, in terms of being able to achieve the performance levels that we're talking about.

I mentioned one watt power-LEDs. We're making devices that are 30 watts and higher. In some cases they can be pulsed up to a hundred. So it's orders of magnitude more power than traditional LEDs that requires some very specialized packaging.

We've developed all of this technology here, both the LED technology and the packaging technology. We have a fab, a semiconductor fab, and we have packaging capabilities. And actually that's been able to sustain us through our consumer electronics type products — TVs and projectors.

As we're getting into some of these new markets, we're looking to expand our capacity. And we have now contract manufacturers overseas that are doing some of our manufacturing work, both on the packaging side and on the chip side.

How much funding have you raised so far and what does your funding look like for the future?

This is actually our Series E. With this round we've raised about $130 million of private equity financing.

This is a significant round. This now allows us to develop the products and increase the capacity of our factories here so that we can achieve the kinds of volumes we're going to need in 2008 and 2009 to become profitable.

And I would say we're targeting an IPO in the late 2009, 2010 timeframe.

This financing would certainly bridge us to that point.

Have current market conditions affected the timing of an offering?

We don't really look at it on a day to day basis. I don't know what the markets are going to be like in 2009 and 2010.

If the market conditions are favorable and the time is right, and our business climate is right, then it could happen as soon as late 2009. If we need to have that be a 2010 type of event, we can weather that storm, or 2011.

There certainly will be enough business going on and enough revenue coming in where we can weather that storm.