LAS VEGAS — Aldo Kamper’s seven-year career as CEO of Osram Opto Semiconductors neatly overlaps the transformation of parent company Osram over the last decade.
Osram, a German company once known in the United States for Sylvania light bulbs (Osram GmbH acquired GTE’s Sylvania lighting division in 1993), identifies itself today as a “tech company.” Highlighting its light source technologies, Osram is driving R&D projects into such diverse fields as illumination, sensing and visualization.
Aldo Kamper, CEO of Osram Opto Semiconductors, at CES (photo: EE Times)
If its booth at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month was any indication, Osram is a core light-source supplier to lidars that analyze vehicles’ surroundings and a provider of headlights that shine the road ahead but can automatically adjust intensity to prevent blinding oncoming vehicles or pedestrians. Osram also provides lights for iris scanning and facial recognition in smart phones, and provides sensors embedded in wearable devices.
While Kamper isn’t claiming credit for the parent company’s transition, he knows that basic semiconductor technologies and their devices — developed and manufactured by his own division Opto Semiconductors — have been critical to Osram’s recent growth.
After successfully divesting its lamps business, Osram GmbH — with 4 billion euro earnings in FY 2017 — last year generated revenues from three business units: Opto Semiconductors (1.7 billion euros), Specialty Lighting (2.3 billion euros) and Lighting Solutions and Systems (1.0 billion euros).
Today, Osram Opto Semiconductors (Regensburg, Germany) is the world's second largest manufacturer of optoelectronic semiconductors after Japan’s Nichia.
In a one-on-one interview with EE Times during CES, Kamper, who took over at Osram Opto Semiconductors in 2010 at the age of 40, showed no signs of boredom after seven years in the same division. Instead, the youthful-looking Kamper talked much like a kid in a candy store, still awe-struck by the potential of various optoelectronic applications in everyday life.
A Dutch native, Kamper joined Osram in 1994 after graduating from the University of Limburg. He spent two years — between 1997 and 1999 — in California at Stanford University’s graduate school of business earning an MBA. After two years in Silicon Valley’s technological hothouse, Kamper thought: “There is no way I’m going back to a lightbulb company.”
Fortunately, Kamper didn’t have to find a new job at a chip company in Silicon Valley, because the lightbulb company was catching the high-tech bug. The Opto Semiconductors team became an integral part of Osram’s light bulb-to-tech revolution.
Today, 50 percent of Opto Semiconductors’ revenue comes from the automotive sector. The rest of the Opto Semiconductors’ business derives from the consumer sector where optoelectronics is applied to everything from wearable devices to signal generations. Having two sectors to lean on by “going back and forth between them” is a good thing, according to Kamper. It proves that “we are not a one-trick pony.”
Opto Semiconductors’ product portfolio includes high-performance light-emitting diodes (LEDs) — designed for automotive and general lighting applications — miniature LEDs for mobile devices, as well as infrared diodes (IRED), semiconductor lasers and detectors.
Manufacturing is the key
Osram’s rapid growth couldn’t have happened and wouldn’t continue without the company’s intense R&D and ability for cost-efficient production, according to Kamper. “After all, we are in the cost-intensive game for semiconductors,” he said.
Case in point: Last November, Osram opened a new plant in Kulim, Malaysia. The German company believes it will be “the world's largest LED factory using 6-inch wafers.”
Osram Opens the world's largest LED chip factory using 6-in. wafers in Kulim, Malaysia (photo: Osram)
But wait. If Osram Opto Semiconductors is indeed in the semiconductor business, shouldn’t the company be fabless?
Next page: No foundries for LED chips