In this presentation, Terri Jordan (business development/CEO) outlines Crystal IS's deep‑UVC LED technology, which is built on a proprietary, low‑defect aluminum nitride crystal‑growth process. The resulting LEDs emit a narrow, monochromatic band between 250 nm and 280 nm, delivering high radiance (up to 66 mW) and long lifetimes. Jordan emphasizes the technology’s key advantages—wavelength specificity, compact point‑source form factor, safety (no mercury or glass), instant on/off, and energy efficiency—positioning it as a disruptive replacement for traditional mercury lamps. She details primary market opportunities: germicidal water disinfection and water‑quality monitoring, food surface sanitization, air disinfection and monitoring, and healthcare/life‑science instruments (DNA quantification, dialysis adequacy, catheter sterilization). A commercialization timeline is presented, targeting an instrumentation product by 2013‑14 and a high‑power purification package for water by 2014‑15. The business model focuses on OEMs and system integrators, leveraging the design freedom of solid‑state LEDs to enable both replacement of legacy lamps and the creation of new applications.
Chapters
So the emergence of LEDs in the UV space is relatively new, very new, especially for the deep UV, which is what we do. So we make UVC LEDs from homegrown aluminum nitride crystals. So our secret sauce is in the substrate crystal growth technology. We make it from very high power UVC LEDs and a proprietary low defect crystal growth technology. So I won't go into the process, but this is, we do all of this and our product ends here in the LED itself. And you'll hear from another presenter who takes that and builds on the value chain from there. So being a solid state technology, it's tailorable and one of the key features is that we can choose what wavelength we focus on. So unlike the blue here, which is a medium pressure mercury lamp, which has all of these wasted bands, up here we make a very narrow band, 250 to 280 nanometer LED. Actually we bin them 250 to 280. So we make a very monochromatic light source. And so as a result we're much more efficient. We tailor it to that because it overlaps with the maximum absorption of bacteria, viruses and cryptosporidium. But in addition to being germicidal, also in this range, it's interesting for instrumentation sectors because we're ideally suited for measuring the absorption and fluorescing species that are also particular in that area. So those are really our two key market areas initially is in the germicidal water sterilization as well as in the, in the instrumentation. So again, we're wavelength specific, monochromatic, wavelength specific, high radiance point sources. So that's the point source is important for the instrumentation. The power you see here, 66 milliwatts is leading in the industry. We've gone, since I've been with the company for two years, we've gone from talking about 5 milliwatt devices to now 66 milliwatt devices. And we're going up from there. So, so it really is the special part is the aluminum nitride that brings out this power, also brings out the lifetime. So the long lasting, inherently long life of LEDs is sort of more difficult to get than you would think. And it's the defect free crystal that allows that to be the two pieces of the value proposition that bring most people to us are the next two, which are compact and versatile. So, so what we're really doing is enabling design freedom and doing things for end users and OEMs that they couldn't do before with mercury lamps. And we'll talk a little bit about that and then the next two. Safe and environmentally friendly of course, no mercury, no potential for leaking toxins and no quartz tubes, so no glass. Very robust technology. Everything is ROHS compliant and disposable so and then finally instantaneous. So it's a solid state technology just like your computer. So it's instant on, instant off, no warm up time and energy efficiency like we talked about before. So our LEDs are used for in monitoring and purification and right now we're working with OEMs to specify flagship products. So we're early on the S curve like Paul talked about this morning, working with the pre early adopters, the lead users in flagship products for their product portfolios. So I can't talk about the specific customers but we're in each of the areas water, food, air and healthcare industries. But frankly our largest focus is in the water area. So this is in point of use drinking water disinfection, which is probably what you would expect for consumer devices and other applications, but also in water quality monitoring. So we talked about fluorescing and absorbing species. So online water quality monitoring where LEDs are replacing things like xenon, flash lamps and other light sources has been a key application for us and then even in the ultrapure water generation. So we've met NSF 55 criteria in the drinking water and we're also meeting the type 1, 2 and 3 applications in laboratory water. So we have technically proven this technology and you'll start to see products coming to market in the next couple of years. The other markets and I'll just quickly go through these in the interest of time but the food application area we're still early in the arsenic phase here we're working with research teams in the traditional areas of UV homogenization, but also in surface sanitization where we can get the LEDs into areas where other light sources can't go. We also in air applications, so in room UVGI as an example, we work with Harvard Medical Health for drug resistant tuberculosis and eliminating that and showing that the UV LEDs are in many ways much more effective than the mercury lamps that are used today. Working on proving out that technology as well as well as air quality monitoring. So pollutants like ozone and things like that. So like with water, air has both the monitoring side as well as the disinfection side and also in healthcare and life sciences. So micro volume, DNA quantification, micro volume and handheld instruments and the scientific instruments side we're specifying and qualifying our LEDs into those applications as well, dialysis adequacy, in other words, urea endpoint detection is another application for us in the healthcare. And then surface sterilization, all kinds of little things, catheters, et cetera, need to be sterilized and the UV LED does better than the big, you know, mercury lamps for that. So where we are today is we're going to be launching two products. We'll launch, you'll see here the longest. This, I'm sorry, is missing in your book. I noticed it this morning. But this is our commercialization timeline. We've frozen in our technology development so that we can develop products. We're actually still developing technology but in terms of our new product introduction cycle, we're using technology that we've all the processes have been locked in. So we'll launch first an instrumentation product. The Latest will be 2014, but we're trying to get it into 2013 and then following that. And again, this is another one that both I, as the business development person and the CEO is committed to pulling in. But of course, course we don't want to over commit. So 2015 will be the latest that we introduce our purification high power package for the water industry. But our sincere desire is to get it into 2014. So I talked about, we're specifying to end users and we are also expanding our business model to include UV source and system integrators to access broader pieces of the market. And I've certainly found that anytime you heard about disruptive technologies from Paul this morning as replacement technologies in stable markets and that's absolutely going to be a place for UV LEDs. You can see these are all applications that we're working on with various customers now. But additionally what we find is that whenever we have this kind of design freedom enabling, there's not only replacement but new what we don't know, we don't know what we don't know. And so there's a lot more new technologies that are able to be introduced as well. So it's a very exciting time for us. Thank you.
