International Service Team - From LED Lighting Design to Endless Creativity: LEXIN OPTO

LEXIN OPTO's main products include LED lighting and optoelectronic devices, such as car light module design, exterior structure design, prototyping, etc. Located in Tainan, where numerous automotive lighting manufacturers gather, LEXIN OPTO's design capabilities provide strong support to OEM automotive lighting manufacturers, and such projects account for the majority of the company's services. In addition, the company also cooperates with universities and research institutions to develop high-power LED products, laying a solid foundation with its technological advantages. In 2021, LEXIN OPTO joined the IoT Service Hub as a smart manufacturing consultant, and has provided invaluable support in product design to many startup teams.

In the early days of its establishment, LEXIN OPTO mainly provided ODM design services and its unique design capabilities were the highlight. "There are not many teams in Taiwan that can design lighting fixtures, especially in automotive applications. We accumulated much experience from our cooperation with Japanese partners in the early days, which laid the foundation for our capabilities to design automotive lighting," explained Jerry, Product Design Manager at LEXIN OPTO, showing great confidence as he talked about the competitiveness of his team. The complexity of car lighting module design gave LEXIN OPTO a big headache for sure, but now that they've overcome this difficulty, it has become their niche.

Optical design involves many parameters, including curvature, material, energy distribution emissivity, emission angle, etc. What is more, LED modeling is also not an easy task to do. Thus, for one product in optical design to be launched, it would require multiple simulations and calculations to give the best solution. This means a considerable amount of time and resources. LEXIN OPTO has developed its own set of computer models and has collaborated with the Dept. of Photonics at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University to ensure the accuracy and reliability of such models.

After receiving the client's needs, LEXIN OPTO will examine the finest details before proceeding with the design of the lighting. They will carefully select LED light sources with a smaller chip size but higher brightness. With their thorough understanding of lighting design, they can produce LED light sources that are brighter and clearer than those made by its competitors with projection effects meeting the client's exact requirements while reducing material and energy consumption at the same time.

Furthermore, the team's professional background in industrial design allows them to have higher standards for the final product, especially in terms of its "appearance," so as to enhance the product's practicality and aesthetics simultaneously. LEXIN OPTO pays great attention to details and the design procedures in its workflow, regarding design as its core competitiveness. Interestingly, the founder of LEXIN OPTO is also an industrial designer, thus versed at the exterior design for products, which really brings a unique design style to all LEXIN OPTO's works.

Take the acrylic table lamp commissioned by an Italian brand for example: The client only provided a few hand-drawn sketches in the initial development process. However, after some communication, the LEXIN OPTO pitched in and completed the LED selection as well as the design of the lampshade structure, acrylic pattern, and projection lamp type. In addition to lighting effects, other factors were also considered during the process, including the acrylic texture and even a demolding solution to best improve the yield during mass production. All these details were covered in the overall planning. Despite its main business in the ODM sector, LEXIN OPTO is a diversified company, and optical design is only one part of its services. So far, the company has applied its experience and technologies to the design of car lights and other products.

When talking about the company's collaboration with the IoT Service Hub, Jerry shared a few interesting cases.

Vehicle-mounted monitoring solution: During the design process, LEXIN OPTO focused on different user scenarios and took all the possibilities into consideration to optimize the product's appearance and operation in use. After optimization, the product is not only simple-to-use with basic functions such as wireless vehicle information, but is also endowed with many innovative designs. For example, hooks and Velcro are added to make it more convenient. Plus, there are a total of seven holes and grooves to make the cables more stable and less likely to break. Last but not least, the product's curvature design is also ergonomic, making it convenient for users to install the cables.

Dead chicken removal system: In chicken farms, the removal of dead birds is very important, but in the client's case, the equipment for picking up dead chickens was just a machine without an exterior case or shell. The robot arm was also a set product, thus not flexible enough. Therefore, the success rate of pickup was only less than 50%. To improve the success rate, we designed a new claw and processed it with aluminum alloy for better friction, improving the success rate by a significant difference.

The team also designed a searchlight for the device to make it more effective when used at night. "When we were designing the searchlight, the brightness and range of illumination both needed to be taken into consideration," Jerry explained. Through continuous optimization, the designers finally came up with a convenient, practical, and efficient combination of case and searchlight, equipped with visual recognition algorithms that helped to significantly reduced labor costs.

The core competitiveness of LEXIN OPTO is its ability to integrate different resources and provide clients with customized products, as well as how it can complete design planning and provide the best solution in a short time. For the next step, the company is seeking to work its way into the IoT market. While cooperating with the IoT Service Hub, LEXIN OPTO has provided valuable design services to the coached teams. In return, the company also gained a lot of knowledge in the trends of IoT and AI development. With past projects giving it inspirations through quality two-way interactions, the company has not only put in efforts to validate Taiwan's IoT ecosystem, but will also keep forging ahead to foster its tech competitiveness in the future.