the Indian light market at 2015 is expected to be worth around Rs 2,000 crore. With the last year market worth which is around Rs 225 crore the expected growth rate exceeds 50% per annum.

“As India undergoes an infrastructure transformation in the next few years, the country has an unprecedented opportunity to leapfrog the rest of the world by becoming an early, large-scale adopter of LED technology,” said Jim Haworth, chairman and chief executive officer of Lighting Science Group.

The U.S based world’s leading LED manufacturing and marketing company Lighting Science Group join hands with Dixon Technologies for manufacturing and marketing a very large scale LED lights in India. They planned to manufacture 65 watts sub-$15 omnidirectional street, industrial, outdoor and domestic lamps.

As per National Sample Service Office statistics, about 39% of households in rural India still use kerosene to meet their lighting requirements. Kerosene lamps generally provide poor quality light; produce greenhouse gas emissions and most importantly, have significant health and safety hazards associated with them. Thus the need for an alternative solution for rural lighting arises.

In India around 95,000 villages are still not connected to the power grid. Out of these, approximately 18,000 villages are unlikely to ever have access to the national grid due to their remote location.

Luminous Power Technologies Limited, provider of power backup solutions for home, commercial, telecom towers & renewable energy systems has launched LED (light emitting diode) based Solar Lighting Solution, a low cost solution for rural home lighting requirements.

LED usage continues to rise across applications and  lighting is leading with a predicted increase of 20 percent  over 2010.

According to DisplaySearch, the total package revenue for backlight and lighting applications was $7.2 billion in 2010 and is forecast to reach $12.7 billion in 2014. A heightened demand for LED lighting applications is the main driver of this increase.

In 2011, DisplaySearch predicts global LED capacity will reach 180 billion units, and by 2013 will reach 227 billion.

The total average LED penetration in lighting was 1.4 percent in 2010 and is forecast to reach 9.3 percent in 2014.

MIC Electronics Limited, a Hyderabad-based manufacturer of LED (light-emitting diode) lighting and display systems, is readying itself to take a plunge into the fast-growing LED lighting retail segment, though in a small way to start with, according to chairman and managing director MV Ramana Rao.

“We are going the fanchisee way and have already roped in city-based Navya Lighting for the same. Our first exclusive outlet, with a floor space of 4,000 sft and involving an investment of Rs 50 lakh, will be rolled out in Hyderabad by the end of this August,” he told Business Standard.

It's heartening to see LED lighting beginning to make a more frequent appearance in consumer lighting applications. A development worth watching!

“The single greatest asset a designer can have is self-knowledge. Knowing when your thinking feels right and when you’re trying to fool yourself.” He added, “Knowing your strengths and weaknesses, prowesses and prejudices. Learning when to ask questions and when to believe your answers.”

Besides the passion for electronics and hands-on learning, both Williams and Pease had another quality: humility, along with a recognition that they owed those who came before them. Both acknowledged the many contributions of op-amp pioneer George Philbrick to their personal and career development, and Pease paid special homage in his book to the late Bruce Seddon, an engineer who helped him “appreciate the niceties of worst-case design.” Seddon always lent his ear and helping hand. Wrote Pease, “And if I never got around to saying thank you—well, 30 years is a long time to be an ungrateful, lazy bum, but now’s the time to say, ‘Thank you, Bruce.’”

Pease took the example of Seddon to heart and practiced the same principles, day in and day out, as did Williams in his own way. It’s with that example in mind that I acknowledge the futility of looking for other heroes to fill the space they leave behind or of the need to say goodbye.

The recent passing of Bob Pease and Jim Williams has led to a great deal of discussion and writing about these two great analog designers and the lessons various folks who interacted with them. Here is a great piece by someone who never met them but read their books, on what made them great designers.

India’s version, which is moving closer toward its May 2012 implementation, limits the use of 20 substances from electronics products for sale in India. Global distributor element14, which provides updates and analysis of global environmental legislation, has posted a summary of India’s ROHS on its Web site. According to element14, the proposals on the disposal of WEEE (waste electrical and electronic equipment) do not say whether these substances are restricted or that manufacturers should attempt to avoid them; do not state whether the threshold values refer to the concentrations in the finished product, in homogeneous materials, or in something else; provide no exemptions or any mechanism for requesting exemptions; and lack clarity of limits.

Inconsistencies among global environmental laws are ongoing concerns in the electronics industry, which must greatly modify processes and materials to meet ROHS requirements. The ban of lead from solders in manufacturing has been particularly irksome because unleaded substitutes have worse performance than do leaded substances. The element14 proposal also notes the next set of challenges, including a requirement that medical equipment adhere to the ban, whereas the EU version currently does not. India’s ROHS also bans substances, including some flame retardants, that have no viable alternatives.

Lightech develops components for managing the energy supply to lighting units in order to save energy. The company designs drivers and transformers for use in LED and halogen lighting which it manufactures in China. Lightech chairman David Schreiber and his son Zvi, who serves as CEO, founded the company in 1992.

As a family firm, its financial data emerged in the announcement of its acquisition by Carmanah a year ago: in 2010, Lightech had a net profit of $800,000 on $10.6 million revenue.

TI has won the coveted 2011 NASSCOM Innovation Award in the "Social Innovation: Market Facing" category for its partnership with India's The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) to develop a reference design for solar LED lanterns and charging stations.
TERI has been promoting the use of solar LED lanterns under its "Lighting a Billion Lives" initiative that aims to improve the lives of people living in rural villages across the globe and to help the environment.

• Over 1.6 Billion people across the world live in darkness, with approximately 25% of these living in India. The LaBL (Lighting a Billion Lives) program of TERI adopts a fee-for service model where solar charging stations are set-up in villages under the charge of rural entrepreneurs and solar lanterns are provided on rental basis to households and enterprises.
• This requires a solution (Solar Lantern and charging station) which is low cost, energy efficient, environment friendly, reliable, serviceable and scalable.
• Solar LED lantern has a big market potential even in areas with access to electricity. The solution hence needs to be architected so as to scale up to unique requirements of this market

Texas Instruments Inc. signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire National Semiconductor Corp. for $6.5 billion in cash, the company said Monday (April 4).

"This acquisition is about strength and growth," said Rich Templeton, TI's chairman, president and CEO, said in a statement. Templeton said TI believes it can accelerate growth of National's products with its considerably larger sales force.

The deal, which remains subject to regulatory review and the approval of National's shareholders, would bring together two of the longest-running semiconductor companies and two of the largest vendors of analog chips. TI, founded in 1947, is the No. 1 vendor of analog chips. National, founded in 1959, accounted for about 3 percent of the $42 billion overall analog IC market in 2010.

The merger of two companies, who despite being 50+ years old have continued to innovate, will prove quite interesting in the days to come, not just for analog but the semiconductor market as a whole.