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Technology Stocks : Wolf speed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George who wrote (776)	3/31/1998 2:47:00 AM
From: Toby	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10714

I have no idea what Nichia's LED sales breakdown is. I can tell you that I know of five LED products: Pure blue, blue-green, green, white using phosphor color conversion and white using three red,green,blue LED chips. I don't think its time to discuss a price for DVD lasers. Nichia is working closely with Japanese electronics companies to help them engineer DVD technology around their GaN LD. This year will merely involve shipping some engineering samples to partners, and reliability is not an issue. In 1999, volume orders will begin and the lasers must produce several mW of power with thousands of hours lifetime. Research lasers have already surpassed these minimum standards and a year from now I expect Nichia's pilot line will routinely produce such lasers. Toshiba has announced plans for full production of GaN based DVD in 2000, but given the history of optical recording, I wouldn't bet on it. This industry doesn't move forward gradually since many companies must support each new wavelength standard, and it won't just be the wavelength which changes, rather the IO encoding, drive electronics and so forth. Therefore, standards move ahead as quickly as the slowest firm at the standards committee meeting. The move from IR to red lasers was delayed by years for these reasons. No American firm has ever realized market share in CD lasers and there is no reason to believe the story will be different for DVD when all of the producers are Asian. The upside of the story is that CD lasers are dirt cheap, low margin almost by definition since you have to sell a DVD player for a few hundred bucks someday soon. American and European laser producers have specialized in higher margin power lasers and telecom lasers, with pretty good success. Almost no power lasers are produced in the Far East. As I've said before, Cree's technology is suited for power lasers, since SiC is a better heat sink and the all vertical structure permits Cree to make broad area lasers whereas a Nichia growing lasers on insulating sapphire can only produce narrow stripe, low power devices. I'm sure Cree realizes this simple fact, so I'm surprised when their annual reports continue to mention DVD as an application. Laser TV could be a much larger market.