Nithipalan to further JPSA’s LED presence

MANCHESTER, NH—JP Sercel Associates (JPSA), the longtime maker of ultraviolet (UV) laser micromachining equipment for use in semiconductor processing, has hired Nithi M. Nithipalan as its director of international business development for the LED industry. Nithipalan has worked for 31 years at technology companies around the world, including some well-known manufacturers of LEDs; at JPSA, he will lead the company’s efforts in product development, sales, and marketing.

Nithipalan was most recently CEO and president of Seoul Optodevice Company Ltd. (Seoul, South Korea), a subsidiary of Seoul Semiconductor, one of the world’s largest LED manufacturing companies. Seoul Semiconductor competes in the already lucrative (and potentially huge) LED general-lighting market with other gallium nitride (GaN)-based semiconductor manufacturers such as Cree (Durham, NC) and Osram Opto Semiconductors (Sunnyvale, CA). Seoul Semiconductor is perhaps most well-known for its Acriche line of lighting LEDs, for which it recently claimed the difficult-to-achieve combination of a very high 75 lm/W luminous efficiency with a high color-rendering index of 85 at a color temperature of 3000K (see www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/
368304).

Cofounder of Tekcore

Before that, Nithipalan was president and CEO of Tekcore Co. Ltd. (Nan-Kung, Taiwan), which produces high-brightness GaN-based LEDs. Nithipalan cofounded Tekcore, and while there completed an IPO of the company’s stock.

“Tekcore was established in the year 2000; we started the company with the help of Taiwanese investors,” says Nithipalan. “I was the first non-Taiwanese CEO to manage a Taiwanese company. We grew quickly and went public in 2006. At the time of my departure in 2007, the company had about 500 employees and had three manufacturing facilities.”

Now that he’s at JPSA, he will be developing and promoting the company’s laser-scribing tools (for chip dicing) and laser lift-off tools (which separate the sapphire substrate from the LED wafer)—a shift in his career away from LED devices themselves and to the systems that manufacture them. “I used JPSA tools during my stay in Tekcore and Seoul Optodevice Company, and I am very familiar with their advanced laser systems for the LED industry,” notes Nithipalan. “Being JPSA’s customer in the past, I really understand the benefits of their products, and I look forward to educating my friends in the industry about JPSA’s high-quality laser systems and the advantages they offer.”

—John Wallace