We develop, manufacture and sell light emitting diode (LED) chips and LED components.
Our products are used for general lighting applications, including street lights
and commercial, industrial, system and residential lighting. Our LED chips may
also be used in specialty industrial applications, such as ultraviolet, or UV,
curing of polymers, LED light therapy in medical/cosmetic applications, counterfeit
detection, LED lighting for horticulture applications, architectural lighting
and entertainment lighting.
Utilizing our patented and proprietary technology, our manufacturing process
begins by growing upon the surface of a sapphire wafer, or substrate, several
very thin separate semiconductive crystalline layers of gallium nitride, or
GaN, a process known as epitaxial growth, on top of which a mirror-like reflective
silver layer is then deposited. After the subsequent addition of a copper alloy
layer and finally the removal of the sapphire substrate, we further process
this multiple-layered material to create individual vertical LED chips.
We package our LED chips into LED components, which we sell to distributors
and a customer base that is heavily concentrated in a few select markets, including
Taiwan, the United States and China (including Hong Kong). We also sell our
“Enhanced Vertical,” or EV, LED product series in blue, white, green
and UV in selected markets. We sell our LED chips to packagers or to distributors,
who in turn sell to packagers. Our lighting products customers are primarily
original design manufacturers, or ODMs, of lighting products and the end-users
of lighting devices. We also contract other manufacturers to produce for our
sale certain LED products, and for certain aspects of our product fabrication,
assembly and packaging processes, based on our design and technology requirements
and under our quality control specifications and final inspection process.
We have developed advanced capabilities and proprietary know-how in:
reusing sapphire substrate in subsequent production runs;
optimizing our epitaxial growth processes to create layers that efficiently
convert electrical current into light;
employing a copper alloy base manufacturing technology to improve our chip’s
thermal and electrical performance;
utilizing nanoscale surface engineering to improve usable light extraction;
developing a LED structure that generally consists of multiple epitaxial layers
which are vertically-stacked on top of a copper alloy base; and
developing low cost Chip Scaled Packaging (CSP) technology.
These technical capabilities enable us to produce LED chips and LED component
products. We entered into a Foundry Services and Licensing Agreement with an
ODM partner in December 2015 to assist us with the restructuring of our chips
manufacturing operations. We granted our ODM partner a royalty-free, non-transferable,
nonexclusive license to use our technology and intellectual property for internal
use by the ODM partner’s employees at its facilities for the purpose of
manufacturing, testing and supplying us its products. The ODM partner is working
with us to enable it to ODM vertical chips for us using our vertical technology.
We believe these capabilities, know-how and partnership should also allow us
to reduce our manufacturing costs and our dependence on sapphire, a costly raw
material used in the production of sapphire-based LED devices.
We were incorporated in the State of Delaware on January 4, 2005 and sold our
first LED chips in November 2005. We are a holding company for various wholly
owned subsidiaries. SemiLEDs Optoelectronics Co., Ltd., or Taiwan SemiLEDs,
is our wholly owned operating subsidiary, where a substantial portion of our
assets are held and located, where a portion of our research, development, manufacturing
and sales activities take place. Taiwan SemiLEDs owns a 100% equity interest
in Taiwan Bandaoti Zhaoming Co., Ltd., formerly known as Silicon Base Development,
Inc., which is engaged in the research, development, manufacture, and substantial
portion of marketing and sale of LED products, including lighting fixtures and
systems, and where most of our employees are based.
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