LED chipmaker Epistar Corp of Hsinchu, Taiwan and Intermolecular Inc of San Jose, CA, USA have signed a multi-year extension of their existing collaborative development program (CDP) and royalty-bearing IP licensing agreement of April 2013 to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of Epistar's LEDs.
Under the terms of the agreement, the firms' engineers will continue to work together to leverage Intermolecular's proprietary high-productivity combinatorial (HPC) technology platform to accelerate development and manufacturing qualification of novel materials and processes for advanced LED products.
Founded in 2004, Intermolecular says it has pioneered a proprietary approach to accelerate research and development, innovation, and time-to-market for the semiconductor and clean energy industries. The approach consists of its HPC platform, application-specific workflows and its multi-disciplinary team. Through paid collaborative development programs with customers, Intermolecular develops proprietary technology and intellectual property for its customers focused on advanced materials, processes, integration and device architectures. Intermolecular's mission is to improve R&D efficiency in the semiconductor and clean energy industries through collaborations that use its HPC platform, which allows R&D experimentation to be performed at speeds up to 100 times faster than traditional methods.
"Epistar is leveraging Intermolecular's HPC methodology and technology in order to accelerate R&D experimentation as we bring more advanced, higher-performing LED devices to market," says Carson Hsieh, Epistar's vice president of R&D. "Our CDP with Intermolecular helped to significantly increase the performance of one of our LED products during development, and we are now in the process of implementing that technology in production. In the coming years we expect our continuing relationship with Intermolecular to support further advancements in our technology roadmap," he adds.
"Increasing LED efficiency is the key to reducing LED system cost and enabling widespread adoption of more innovative lighting products," says Sandeep Nijhawan, senior VP & general manager, Clean Energy Group at Intermolecular. The multi-year agreement extension will support Epistar's product innovation strategy through accelerated materials development and LED device integration, he adds.
