tekboy--don't think red is Cree's. Red's not where the money is--every Taiwanese startup fab makes them as a commodity. "Passat blue" is Cree's. Here's a relatively mind-boggling blurb from compoundsemiconductor.net a couple of months ago:
"Norbert Hiller of Osram Opto Semiconductor focused on interior applications, and pointed
out a fascinating movement among car manufacturers – or at least the German ones. Each
company is adopting a signature wavelength. Hiller described it as "a sort of color/brand
recognition". So whereas all BMWs use 605nm LEDs in their instrument panels, all Audis
use 630nm, and Volkswagen has chosen yet another different point in the blue/green
spectrum. He showed an example of an Audi model that already uses 300 – 350 LEDs for
various types of interior illumination, and noted that studies suggest that this figure could
rise to as high as 850 LEDs in just the interior. For this to happen, the LED would have to
capture every spot in the car – not just the dashboard, but also the overhead lights, mirror
lights, glovebox, locks, trunk, etc. But interior plus exterior use could result in as many as
1,000 LEDs being used in each car - and there are around 60 million cars produced each
year."
from compoundsemiconductor.net |
