Osram doubles stage lighting power

Osram doubles stage lighting power - LE RTDUW S2WN

Osram doubles stage lighting power – LE RTDUW S2WN

Following the uprating of its headlamp LED last week, Osram has done the same with its stage lighting flagship.

Thanks to improved chip technology, its latest multi-coloured four-chip Ostar Stage family can be operated at 2.5A – 30W total input power, double that of the previous version.

“The higher current which is necessary for a higher output requires the thermal management of the Osram Ostar Stage to be adapted so that the heat generated in the chip can be removed as effectively as possible”, said Osram product marketing manager Wolfgang Schnabel.

The 1mm² die are red, green, blue and white.

With the beam characteristics and package size as before, existing user can retain their existing optics and the overall design.

Other intended applications are mood and architectural lighting.

High volume production is scheduled for Q1 next year.

Ostar Stage LE RTDUW S2WN at a glance

Dimensions 4.68 x 5.75 x 1.26mm
Chip size 1mm²
Thermal resistance Rth 0.9K/W
Output 30W
Beam angle 120°

See also: Osram reveals best headlamp LED yet

See more Osram stories on Electronics Weekly »

steve bush

VR in sight for ARM’s Mali T-880

VR in sight for ARM's Mali T-880

VR in sight for ARM’s Mali T-880

ARM is positioning its top-end graphics IP – the Mali T-880 – as a virtual reality (VR) engine.

“Smartphones are as big as we want them to be but more computational power is needed in the graphics and display to get more realism,” Mark Dickinson, ARM’s graphics general told electronics Weekly. “We want quality of pixels not quantity of pixels.”

Although VR has been touted as an imminent killer app for the past 30 years, ARM believes that computing power is now capable of delivering it.

“VR is very dependent on computational power,” said Dickinson. “Head-sets need a high frame-rate to handle panning, resolution needs to be high, there has to be a different image for each eye and there’s a need for very low latency.”

ARM, via its T-880 Mali graphics engine launched earlier this year, is able to deliver all of those, said Dickinson.

“We have a solution to VR on the smartphone,” he said. “Smartphone manufacturers are
seeing VR as one of the use cases.”

Asked when smartphone manufacturers would put VR into their phones, Dickinson replied: “They already have done,” citing the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

ARM can actually boast of a VR design win – the Samsung Gear VR uses ARM’s Mali graphics for its VR effects.

david manners

Semiconductor inventories steady, says Jewell

Semiconductor inventories steady, says Jewell

Semiconductor inventories steady, says Jewell

Despite alarm about the state of semiconductor inventories, particularly from the foundries, Bill Jewell’s Semiconductor Intelligence says that: “Semiconductor inventories appear to be under control throughout the semiconductor device supply chain.”

At the semiconductor manufacturers inventory ratios have been stable for eighteen months, says Jewell

Exceptions are Intel and Qualcomm where lower revenues caused Intel’s inventory ratio to go from 29% in Q2 2014 to 37% in Q2 2015 while Qualcomm’s ratio went from 24% to 41% in the same period.

Jewell then looked at users, taking six of the top eight purchasers of semiconductors. None showed any significant change in inventory rate compared to this time last year.

So how about the disties? Jewell finds that the inventory ratio at Arrow and Avnet has been close to 40% for the last eight years.

Finally there are the EMS companies where Jewell surveyed Jabil, Sanmina, Flextronics and Celestica. He finds that the EMS inventory ratio hit 55% in 2007 and has been “fairly steady” since, with a rise in 2011 to 57% from a 50% ratio in 2011.

david manners