Shimon Dahan, CEO, RED Micro Wire (RMW)

Shimon Dahan, CEO, RED Micro Wire (RMW)

In this past year, RED Micro Wire won a Red Herring award, recognizing us as one of the top 100 most promising and innovative technology companies in the world. During 2012 our engineers prepared our unique, glass coated micro bonding wire, getting it ready for release to customers in 2013.

In 2013, RED Micro Wire will begin to ship our RED Copper wire, an enabling device that will resolve many of the issues associated with wire bonding products used for the mass market such as cost, oxidation and bondability.

Additionally, in traditional semiconductor packaging markets where the trend toward miniaturization highlights the need for smaller bonding wires, the RMW solution is able to scale down to 4 microns -- significantly smaller than any current solution and eliminating scalability as a barrier. And due to our unique manufacturing technology, RED Micro Wire's glass-insulated bonding wire is the most price competitive solution available for the mass market.

In 2013, we expect to see continued growth in consumption of units of wire as the semiconductor packaging market continues to grow. And as such, RED Micro Wire also expects to expand its headcount and add more engineering and sales resources.

But RED Micro Wire is not only seeing demand for our bonding wire in traditional semiconductor packaging markets, we've also begun to expand into a new market – LEDs (light emitting diodes), which also require micro bonding wire for manufacturing and packaging.

Yole Development estimates that packaged LED revenue will reach a market size of $11.4 billion in 2012 and will peak to $17.1 billion by 2018, according to their report, "Status of the LED Industry," published in August 2012. Growth will be driven both by the display (LCD TV) and general lighting applications as the market reaches massive adoption of LEDs in lighting.

The adoption of LEDs for general lighting applications strongly depends on technology and manufacturing improvements, which will enhance performance and cost to hit a LED adoption trigger point. Industry consensus points out a cost reduction per lumen of packaged LEDs by a factor of 10X.

As in the semiconductor packaging market, LED wires have also traditionally been gold, and a move to a less costly wire material such as copper could reduce the cost of manufacturing and help bring LED technology to the point where it is generally recognized as the best solution for cost-effective lighting.

We've begun to meet with world-leading companies in this industry, with the goal of establishing collaboration programs with strategic OEMs and market leaders. This is an exciting growth opportunity for us, which will support and accelerate adoption of our RED wire and technology in these new applications.