Ottawa company reinventing light bulb

[Erik Sine]

Ottawa company reinventing light bulb

Vito Pilieci, Canwest News Service

Published: Tuesday, February 26, 2008

OTTAWA -- An Ottawa company says it is about two years away from re-inventing the light bulb.

Group IV Semiconductor has been quietly toiling away since 2003, trying to recycle old telecommunications technology into a new type of bulb that uses a tiny computer chip in the place of a traditional wire filament.

Stephen Naor, chief executive of Group IV, says his company's days of toiling are now drawing to a close. Group IV should have working prototypes of its technology ready by 2010 with the made-in-Ottawa light bulbs appearing on store shelves by 2011.

"Today, most people use incandescent bulbs and those are the same bulbs they have used for the past 100 years," said Naor. "They are incredibly inefficient."

Naor said some people are now moving to compact fluorescent bulbs in order to cut back on their energy consumption. But complaints about the quality of light emitted by the bulbs, as well as the inclusion of toxic chemicals such as mercury in their construction, make the new bulbs far from ideal.

According to Naor, the energy efficiency of his company's bulbs, officially called solid state lights, will be on par with new energy saving compact fluorescent bulbs. The life span will be around 10,000 hours; the light emitted will be much more like a traditional incandescent bulb; and the entire bulb will be recyclable.

"They are made of silicon. There is nothing toxic in them," said Naor. "Everyone knows silicon is the technical term for sand."

When asked about other energy efficient lighting technologies such as LED (light emitting diode), Naor said LED is fine for Christmas lights, but often illuminates too blue for home use. Some higher-quality LED lights have been created to be used in the home, but are more expensive, costing about $100 each.

Keeping the costs of its light bulb chips down has been a crucial component of Group IV's work, according to Naor.

"Low cost is the most central part of what we are trying to do," he said. "It has to retail for as much as compact fluorescent or else people won't buy it."

Group IV's new bulb technology has attracted the attention of some of the world's most recognizable technology investors. Vinod Khosla, founding chief executive of Sun Microsystems and founder of investment firm Khosla Ventures, has poured money into the company. Jozef Straus, former chief executive and co-chair of JDS Uniphase Corp., serves as the chair of Group IV's board of directors.

The company also has attracted investment from Applied Materials Inc., a company that specializes in making manufacturing equipment. Naor said Group IV's relationship with Applied Materials is especially important, as it will allow his company to ramp up production of its silicon light bulb chips quickly, once the prototypes have been perfected.

The Ottawa company will then sell its microchip light bulb technology to companies such as Phillips and General Electric, who will place the chips inside a new generation of energy efficient bulbs.

The 23-employee firm could be seen as the ultimate "green" company. Its light bulb technology is actually leftover, recycled technology from the telecommunications market crash of 2001.

The technology originally was intended to boost the range and speed of long-distance fibre optic networks. The chips were meant to boost the light signal flowing over the network, allowing it to travel longer distances.

In 2003, with the market for telecommunications products in shambles, Naor and his team began to think of new applications for their technology. It dawned on them there are 4.4 billion light bulbs installed annually in the United States and half of those are changed each year. Each year, lighting is a $12 billion US market.

The founders of Group IV realized that, if tweaked, the once-telecom technology could be used to illuminate people's homes.

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[manuellynch]

RF is on its way back into lighting!!! Good stuff. Has a lot to do with the guy in Canada that developed a way to use RF energy to convert water into fuel....a lot of the same principles apply.