Marktech’s LEDs shine efficiently, worldwide

[Erik Sine]

Marktech’s LEDs shine efficiently, worldwide

By R. J. Kelly

Gazette Reporter

Photographer: Peter Barber

Marktech Chief Executive Officer Mark G. Campito is illuminated by a strip of light-emitting diodes.

When Mark G. Campito and a handful of forward-thinking entrepreneurs and engineers formed the company 23 years ago, Marktech was ahead of the wave now surging toward developing more energy-efficient lighting products.

Today, customized light-emitting diode products designed and manufactured by Marktech are all over the country in lighted displays advertising some of the biggest companies in the world, but confidentiality agreements leave the LED maker’s name mostly in the dark.

An LED is a semiconductor that emits light when an electric current is applied. They are much more efficient than conventional incandescent or even fluorescent bulbs, and are used in a wide variety of lighted devices, ranging from tiny indicator lights to giant display screens, signs and lighted panels.

“Nobody knows we’re here,” said Campito, the company’s founder and chief executive officer.

At Marktech’s 15,000-square-foot headquarters at 3 Northway Lane in North Latham, in a low-key business park not far from Albany International Airport, samples of signs, logos and advertising products of instantly recognizable companies line the halls.

“I can’t talk about them … on the record,” Campito said, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Most companies don’t want people to know they don’t do their own electronics,” Campito said.

At a time when the economic outlook for many companies has dimmed, Campito said Marktech’s base of approximately 500 commercial customers “helps us weather the economy.”

The stock market’s gyrations even have a link to Marktech: The Morgan Stanley stock ticker in New York City’s Times Square is lighted with Marktech LEDs, according to Campito.

Combined with a joint venture manufacturing factory in China, Marktech makes the LEDs in all sorts of commercial displays.

The company also is a major North American distributor of Japan-based Toshiba lighting products, according to Campito.

With the greening of America a major element in energy conservation and lighting efficiency, the company is now branching out into LED lights for home and office use.

ILLUMINATING EXHIBITS

The Schenectady Museum & Suites-Bueche Planetarium is testing a system of Marktech LED bulbs to illuminate exhibits with cooler and more efficient lighting. Campito, who is a member of the museum’s volunteer board of trustees, donated LED lights to the museum, according to museum spokeswoman Erin Breslin.

“I’m like a kid in a candy store,” said Paul MacDonald, the museum’s director of building operations. “This is brand-new, state of the art technology.

“[Marktech] wanted to get into the museum field and they wanted to show what the value of LED lighting is,” MacDonald said.

Using a combination of flexible strips of plastic lined with LED at various angles, MacDonald said he has been developing new ways to illuminate museum exhibits.

Marktech also has started a new line of various sized bulbs that contain LED chips and can be screwed into fixtures using the standard Edison-style base found on billions of light bulbs across the nation.

In addition to much lower use of electricity, LED lights emit little heat and do not give off damaging ultraviolet light like the typical incandescent halogen lights often used to spotlight exhibits, MacDonald said.

UV light can degrade sensitive papers, paintings or other artifacts, a major concern for museum officials, he noted.

As far as heat is concerned, “compared to standard industry lighting, it’s next to nothing,” MacDonald said.

Standard halogen lights can quickly raise a museum room at least 10 degrees, according to MacDonald, requiring additional costs for the climate control system to keep the room at the desired temperature.

Although LEDs are significantly more expensive than standard lighting, “the payback period is very fast,” MacDonald said. They use about a tenth as much electricity as halogen lights use, he said.

Also, LEDs can last for years without needing to be replaced, according to Marktech’s chief engineer, Vincent C. Forte. And unlike fluorescent bulbs, which contain toxic mercury, they don’t pose disposal problems, Forte said.

Over the past several years, various types of compact fluorescent lights, often called CFLs, have been widely touted for their reduced energy consumption. However, fluorescent lights typically contain mercury and require recycling procedures for proper disposal to avoid environmental contamination.

MacDonald, as well as Marktech officials, are convinced that the benefits of LEDs will supplant the popularity of CFLs.

“Everybody will find out about LEDs sooner rather than later,” MacDonald said.

Both CFLs and the traditional fluorescent vacuum tubes also shatter into tiny pieces if they fall and break.

That is not a problem with modern LEDs, Forte said.

“There’s no mercury and no lead,” he said.

Some of the LED strips “can be cut to fit in the field,” noted Campito. They also don’t break easily, he said, as he suddenly rapped a strip hard on the edge of a desk for emphasis.

COST AN ISSUE

A main drawback: LEDs are expensive, and are not an affordable option to light a room.

With standard overhead fluorescent tubes still lighting even Marktech’s offices, “that’s the holy grail” of LED designers, Campito said, as he glanced upwards.

New LED designs are in the works, he said. The company is also looking for a distributor for Marktech’s new home and office lighting products.

Another local user of Marktech’s LED lighting is the Latham motorcycle accessory installer No Magic Neon. Hidden wires and systems of tiny LEDs provide glowing shades of decorative lighting for No Magic Neon customers, Campito said.

Although LED signs can glow like the old-fashioned neon tubes, most such signs now use LEDs, Campito said.

“The neon era is over,” he said.

The bulk of Marktech’s business is providing LED lighting systems for major companies, including an international soft drink company, fast-food chains and food suppliers.

Various types of lighting use different wavelengths or color temperatures on the light spectrum depending on the type of illumination desired, according to Steve Hubert, Marktech’s chief of operations.

“Warmer colors enhance red meat,” he noted, so they are popular for display cases in stores selling meat.

“We design everything here,” Forte said, as he showed a testing table full of hundreds of tiny LED chips designed with different chemical components to give off different colors.

Lighting a mixture of different red, blue and green primary colored chips by automatically sending electrical charges through them creates a desired overall color for a sign or display, like a painter might blend oils to achieve a desired color.

The tiny chips, about the size of a pencil dot, are manufactured on a wafer about 2 or 3 inches in diameter.

“In the old days, I used to pick them up with a tweezers,” Forte said. Now they are cut apart with a diamond saw and the chips are picked up and placed in lighting structures by an automatic machine.

BUILDING THE COMPANY

Campito is not an engineer by training.

He was an electrical technician in the U.S. Navy from 1969 to 1973, then got a history degree from Siena College.

Campito said he started getting involved with LED research around 1979 as a marketer for a company called Latham company called Xciton run by former GE engineers.

Xciton was purchased by National Semiconductor, he said.

Forte, also an Albany area native, joined up with Marktech when Campito was forming the company. Forte was still getting his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at the time.

“Our breakthrough” in the company’s early years, Campito said, was developing LED readouts for medical oximeters, those little fingertip devices that hospitals and medical technicians use to measure pulse and blood-oxygen readings.

While designing for customers needs takes place at Marktech’s Latham headquarters, manufacturing is done at a factory in Guang Zhou, China.

“We couldn’t afford to do it here,” Campito acknowledged.

Starting with five employees in 1985, Marktech now employs 31 people in Latham and 175 in China.

Several of the Latham employees are native Chinese speakers, including product marketing engineer Karen Zhang, a graduate of Western Michigan University with a doctorate in physics.

Another Chinese speaker, Helen Somerville, a Beijing native, works out of the Latham office giving the orders to the factory.

Company officials are frequent travelers to China, Campito said.

His Latham office is adorned with numerous pieces of Asian art, including an approximately 5-foot-long framed series of stones, engraved in Chinese characters like the bindings of books.

The piece, which Campito said denotes the 26 strategies of war, was a gift from his wife, Jan Starr Campito.

The Campitos are the parents of two teenagers.

[Brian]

If he had been holding up neon in the picture he would have been wearing sunglasses!!! and be getting a tan hahah

GO NEON!!