By Felipe Melhado
During my recent visit to Lumileds, I had the opportunity to sit down once again with CTO Oleg Shchekin and his team. Our discussion ranged from regulatory challenges in vehicle lighting and the company’s growing role in automotive, industrial, and consumer applications. Oleg showed me a good picture of how Lumileds is balancing deep technical heritage with the pressures of today’s competitive market while transitioning their business.
As regional importance in the US, we naturally started our conversation with glare, since our engineering ambition to have bright lights and meet regulatory and ergonomic perceived limits present some challenges. While Europe has enforced good standards, the US has stepped up on glare requirements leaving OEMs, suppliers and regulators to discuss how to achieve the right balance. Lumileds is actively engaged in SAE workshops and sees ADB as the bridge between brightness and safety. LUXEON NeoExactADB direct imaging projector modules provide the good balance between performance and customization, offering solutions with hundreds of individually addressable pixels that are designed to deliver a controlled, cost-effective ADB headlighting solution that minimize glare without sacrificing beam intensity.
Oleg stressed that simplification and integration are as important as performance. Lumileds is leveraging topcontact LED and thermal ceramic inlay technology in hybrid combination with FR4 PCBs
to manage thermal performance in line with automotive application requirements without sacrificing weight or adding assembly complexity. With this modularization approach Lumileds enables Tier 1s and OEMs to increase cross platform engineering efficiency and deliver advanced systems while maintaining competitive economics.
LUXEON Neo Exact combined with LUXEON Go create technical solution options that can be bundled to achieve performance and cost as needed. Addition of LUXEON Go multi color solutions expands the portfolio further into Turn Signal and DRL applications, simplifying solutions that streamline assembly not only of the modules, but the complete lamp making it more cost effective system solution. Furthermore, Lumileds is offering a projector solution that can be customized to have multiple top contact LEDs and get the benefits of this technology.
Moreover, Lumileds showed me their standardized LED bulbs: LUXEON LxN, as well as LUXEON 3D LED for signaling and car body lighting applications, which complement their modular solutions portfolio.
Additionally, Oleg shared the recent announcement that Lumileds International is entering a new chapter with ownership transitioning to San’an and Inari, who will invest in the company and leverage technical and industrial capabilities while enabling Lumileds to further grow independently under its current management team. Lumileds will continue to deliver innovative lighting solutions from its R&D centers in proximity to its global customer base and continue to further optimize its supply chain resiliency in response to customer needs.
For Shchekin, the future is clear: Lumileds is not just an automotive lighting component supplier, it is a digital light engine company shaping the way light is delivered, from the road ahead to the devices in our pockets. As such, he remains confident that the Lumileds’ history of innovation, paired with strong IP and strategic partnerships, and fueled by its upcoming new ownership, will position Lumileds in the future to deliver sustainable value to its customers.
