(www.semiconductor-today.com)
Gallium might be a problem. "China accounted for 99% of worldwide primary low-purity gallium production. The remaining primary low-purity gallium producers outside of China included Japan and Russia. Germany, Hungary, and Kazakhstan ceased primary production in 2016, 2015, and 2013, respectively. Ukraine most likely ceased primary production in 2022. Several new gallium production projects were announced including those in Australia, Canada, Greece, Kazakhstan, and the Republic of Korea."[1]
The price of gallium has increased by a factor of 10 in the last 10 years. It's doubled since last year.[2] A huge new demand for gallium is going to be a problem.
[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-gallium.pd...
Yes mostly. The West outsourced this market due to heavy environmental and financial costs of extracting it. It’s sort of the same story as for a lot of the rare earth elements.
https://payneinstitute.mines.edu/strategic-intervention-to-r...
> China produces approximately 98% of the global gallium supply and 88% of the global germanium supply; dominance has been fueled by government intervention. Beijing mandated its rapidly expanding aluminum producers to install the capacity to extract gallium. Between 2005 and 2015, China’s production of low-purity gallium surged from 22 metric tons to 444 metric tons, a nearly 2000 percent increase. This move flooded the market and forced producers in the United Kingdom, Germany, Hungary, and Kazakhstan to shutter their operations.
https://www.riotinto.com/en/news/releases/2026/rio-tinto-adv...
Here they are somehow eliminating the need for phosphors for color conversion but they didn't say how.
I mean, if GaN is a problem we are already in a bad shape.
The problem with outsourcing all your manufacturing so you can mildly increase profits and destroy any organized labor is that whoever you outsourced it to holds you hostage.
Any talk of this is just propaganda to sell weapons and increase the "defense" budget.
So gallium is a byproduct of bauxite mining but requires some sophistication. China produces 60% of the world's aluminum. India is the second largest producer but doesn't have the infrastructure to extract gallium. That will probably change. But it is a sophisticated process so you need an entire supply chain for that too. China has that. India does not (currently).
But India would avoid the geopolitical issues of being dependent on China or Russia.
> The problem with outsourcing all your manufacturing
Not having a war is a good thing, not a problem.
They are two separate countries now, unless you think North/South Korea are the same, Russia/Ukraine, etc.
No, they are not. The US legally recognized Taiwan (fka Formosa) as Chinese territory in 1943 and 1945 and legally recognized the PRC as the sole legal government of China in 1979, following a similar recognition by the UN in 1971.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12503
There are only 11 countries in the world that recognize Taiwan as a sovereign entity and the largest are Guatemala, Haiti, and Paraguay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_T...
You should open a history book. Or two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Peo...
I find it hard to believe this comment was made in good faith.
Rinse, Repeat.
Hilariously not any organized labor, just the local group. The largest organized labor group in the history of the world is alive and well, and is headquartered in Beijing.
This was basically just a case of kicking the can down the road really hard. The can is still there, waiting for you, and you are now completely dependent on it (oh and it has nuclear weapons).
Sounds like all the more reason for china to start a war.
Just having one side dependent isn't going to stop war.
This is almost the exact same argument that was used to justify economic cooperation with Russia, they’d never start a war in Europe because their economy would collapse!
Ooos.
Also we read the warning as "don't buy from them, rather buy from us".
And it was extensivly debated in general.
The EU kept at it with plans to expand until the war started for the second time and “someone” took it upon themselves to violently sever that link.
Now at latest by 2014 that should have changed indeed. But even then different approaches would have been possible then cutting all ties and hope this will work out better.
I'm no fan of Donald Trump but this was one of his rare Ws. At a NATO summit in 2018, he warned Europe about the dangers of dependency on Russian energy and basically bullied Germany into building an LNG plant, something that was critical to Europe after Russia invaded Ukraine 4 years later [1].
Biden as Vice President to Obama warned Europe of the same thing in 2016 [2] regarding Nord Stream 2.
So American administrations have consistently and repeatedly warned Europe about the dangers over 6+ years. So how can anyone argue that "[Russia would] never start a war in Europe" when the US said basically that?
[2]: https://www.dw.com/en/biden-warns-europe-against-dependency-...
Could this be like nanostructure based? Like nanoscale etching that messes with the light, created on top of UV LEDs?
That could be done if the LED actually contains a multiple structure combining red, green and blue LEDs, but in the past such a combined LED had the disadvantage that in time the efficiency of the 3 components degraded at a different rate, which resulted in a color shift.
For now, the luminous efficiency of this LED is quite poor, unsuitable for lighting but only for indicator LEDs or display applications, but they claim that for such small LEDs even the traditional LEDs had poor efficiency and they hope to improve the efficiency later to more acceptable levels.
CIE's R96a (1999) remains stuck in a disagreement between scientists and manufacturers. This means that lights currently specified with a CRI value are advertising an inaccurate measure of their ability to reveal the color of objects.
A very good CRI does not guarantee a very good color reproduction, but a poor CRI guarantees a bad color reproduction.
I imagine this is like 20 years away from hitting consumer design, but I bet it'll be used for some cool stuff.
Can someone who is an expert on the topic comment about if the statement regarding AI is true and if so then by how much (and how big/small of a problem it is), or if the Company is suggesting it out of pure hype of AI mania.
> Market research firm Omdia projects that the micro LED display market revenue will grow from $10.54 million this year to approximately $6.8 billion by 2032, particularly in applications for smart glasses and ultra-small displays.
> The WICOP technology involves directly mounting LED chips onto substrates without separate wires or packaging. Seoul Semiconductor and Seoul Biosys have been developing ultraviolet (UV), blue, green, red, and infrared (IR) micro LEDs based on this technology, and have now expanded its application to include white light.
Fascinating results nonetheless even discounting AI use. Having half the price is insane, also 10.54 million seems incredibly small and 6.8 Billion is a little insane. Kinda wild to see such massive growth expected in such short amount of time.
> if the Company is suggesting it out of pure hype of AI mania.
IMHO, this is pretty transparently r&d for better? data transmission attached to the trend of the day that does a lot of data transmission. Where better is higher bandwidth, lower cost, etc.
AI is the current trendy thing, but better data transmission will always have applications.
One of the pitches was for a fairly good nonprofit service. I thought it was a good idea. Sort of a "help people that help people" thing. I can dig that.
At the very end of the pitch, the last thing the young lady said, was "And we're looking at implementing blockchain technology in our service."
I don't remember exactly what the service was, but it clearly had no applications for distributed-key tech.
I think it probably cost her the backing. No one was fooled. I think someone told her that she had to mention blockchain, somewhere.
Looks like the innovation here is the multi-wavelength LED, some kind of multiple-quantum-well thing maybe?
See also the other comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50328023 V/F doesn't really exist in Korean and B equivalent in latin character/ English sound gets used instead.
And many Korean legitimate news sites use AI to translate their articles to English (and other languages).
Never heard of Ajupress, but they seem legitimate based on short research. More than this semi conductor today site I'd say. The news site being Korean, would think they're way more likely to be the original source, which then got picked up by the semi conductor site.
This is their original article, in Korean, if you prefer original sources, in their respective language: https://www.ajunews.com/view/20261028171303299