Gadgetory

in this episode of scenic conversations we meet a guy who hitchhiked from Texas to California to get a job at a floppy disk company later he rose to become the CEO of seagate reinvention being the essence of Silicon Valley his ouster from that job has put bill watkins back in the startup mode on a mission to light up your life with LEDs twenty percent of the american grid of energies for lighting alone so you look at that market how do i how do i make people save money and energy and how can i do that with intelligent light from control functions lower energy light etc we open up all these possibilities and that's what bridgelux is the bottom first it's all about LED lighting but made a different way what happens see this is a reactor room so therefore you have a nuclear and oh yeah this is where we grow our epitaxial films on our way firs near either silicon on sapphire how can you drive down the cost of LED because right now LED fixtures for both institutional and consumers are high today we manufacture LEDs on sapphire base substrate this is our 2 inch sapphire wafer so sapphire waiver these are basically sapphire disks you're a thin very thin but this is pretty small but it's small it's fairly expensive than we thought well what can we do different boom now this is classic semiconductor business this is this is pure adis Felix whispers yes your dear and we basically use gases of materials and we and we build us a series of layers what we have solved is the ability to do that 8-inch and that those temperatures and those gases without any cracking or breaking or lattice new trends this is where you come in and you go to factories that have moved on to a 12-inch right which is the new huggy right they used to make DRAM for our USB drives or whatever is or suffocate off right and you say you guys aren't doing much with those lines we want we can make lights on make lights on that flight making LED lights in a way that echoes making silicon chips doesn't just drive down costs it also paves the way to embedding intelligence and new functions into that module that lives in a light socket we don't look at that as a socket we think of as a note when you start putting a light into chips and making them intelligent light now you have an ability to applications here why not turn your lights off from your iPhone it's going to be a light that eventually will react to your environment your motion eventually we can see lights that can look at the room that will measure which one on the room and are just a light to optimal reading conditions are optimal tv-watching conditions Watkins departed seagate after the dramatic falling out with their board one that led to a new beginning that seems to suit him after seagate I thought you know what I want to go back to real work I'm tired of lawyers and bankers I want to go back and this opportunity came up to look at this company and I came down here and looked at it and as hokies this may sound I came in I met these young engineers you know and there's no 28 years old I probably all think they're young like I felt loved them been a long time since I've been around a bunch of people who would think they're changing the world and so I said you know what I don't need the entourage or the jets and stuff like that um this is what I want to do and that's what I'm doing not now I want to go back to record right now so imma get this as big as I can so I give myself a dad they said yes it's right as is the idea that bridgelux engineers could turn the lighting business on its head the brand names that we've known for such a long time are going to change and I think every light eventually in 10 or 15 years of LED vision the opportunities are phenomenal not only the technology but in the product and in the whole business mom I mean that's what makes such an exciting energy it's going to change dramatically now you may have noticed that a thread of cost-saving wines through all that bridgelux is attempting and that approach is going to be essential as most of their customers large or small are used to thinking of lighting as just a cost to be managed rather than an opportunity to do more with all that infrastructure that lies over our heads