The roadmap developed in 1987-88 was expanded in 1991-92. It has proven to be a major asset for the entire industry. SEMATECH shared it with the world, and today the organization has over 1,000 engineers and scientists and an “evergreen” document maintained on the Web site at a cost of about half a million dollars a year.

Mark Ginsberg

Department of Energy

Dr. Ginsberg, whose primary area of responsibility is energy efficiency, said that energy efficiency is not the only potential advantage to an LED industry. He praised the roadmapping process, and said that his department’s Vision 2020 roadmap was an effort to bring an industrial perspective to an agenda that would allow government and industry to collaborate, as they have in other industries.

A roadmap should include short-, medium-, and longer-term perspectives, he said. Many people believe the department’s role is to represent the high-risk, long-term, precompetitive perspective, but he suggested a variety of roles, including the reduction of information and policy barriers.

He described a “windows roadmap” for solid-state lighting, with the objective of creating active windows that are appliances within the wall. These active windows would provide all forms of information and entertainment, including educational material, news, and stock prices; a flick of a switch could change a representation of a cloudy day to a sunny day. “What I sense today,” he said, “is appreciation for a technology that is going to have more and more applications as we look more closely. We’re just touching on the edge of it.” He recalled the earlier discussion of Thomas Edison’s role in developing new technologies. Although Edison “may have been fortieth on a list of inventors for the original incandescent,” he had the genius of seeing its potential for lighting and the imagination to implement the concept in ways that no one else did. In the same way, he helped to invent the film industry.

Dr. Ginsberg said that DOE has a key role to play in implementing a solidstate lighting industry. The industry’s roadmap fits his own division’s mission