Company where innovation gets the green light

By Yoke Har Lee

Traffic lights blink and most drivers wouldn't give them another thought except to stop or go.

But for a Christchurch company, figuring out how best to drive these lights could mean a whole new line of business.

Sound Logic Research's (SLR) understanding of the nature of light emitting diodes (LEDs) is giving the company another world first achievement - designing a traffic light using LEDs which have the potential to save huge amounts of power.

Founder of SLR, Paul Sintes, 58, started his business in the ubiquitous garage, home to many innovative companies.

Having observed the development in the use of LEDs in traffic lights, Mr Sintes thought he could design not only an "intelligent" traffic light based on LEDs, but one that cuts power usage significantly.

Consider: the best LED-based traffic lights in the US use 14 watts of power. Mr Sintes' lights work using an average of five watts, and nine watts at the maximum. On cold nights, where LED technology is best served, only two watts of power is being used.

Christchurch City Council is the process of evaluating SLR's intelligent traffic lights and initial tests have been most encouraging, Mr Sintes said.

Bill Sissons, traffic signals engineer for the city council, estimated that using SLR's traffic lights across the city's 213 controlled intersections would save the council $93,000 per year in power bills and $38,000 in the annual cost of traffic lights.

Mr Sintes said SLR's traffic lights slash power use by 85 per cent and if all traffic lights in New Zealand were converted, it would mean saving the energy provided by about half of a small dam.

SLR's LED traffic lights marry the best of electronics, LED technology, sensing technology and optical technology. The project received development funding from Technology New Zealand.

"We looked carefully at how to drive the LED - the aim is to make a traffic light with the minimum number of LEDs that we could use, therefore saving costs and also saving money in driving this thing."

The development of LED - which is basically a piece of silicon dosed with impurities to get a desired colour - for use in traffic light has come such a long way from the days described by Mr Sintes as the "sledgehammer approach" of cramming as many LEDs as possible into a light and cranking the power up to run the lights.

Progress in development has reduced the number of LEDs used in traffic light as well as the amount of power needed.

And those studying the arcane life of LEDs have found that the more power you crammed into LEDs, the shorter their life span is. And under cold conditions, the LEDs actually produce more light.

Mr Sintes has tapped this property in the LED and married it with sensor technology to provide a traffic light that adjusts itself so that it produces just enough light, using minimal power.

"What we have done is to engineer a system that constantly monitors the ambient light outside and adjusts the light coming out of the traffic light accordingly.

"So on a dark night, it cranks the power down. The system maintains a constant ratio between the outside ambient light and the light emitted by the traffic light.

"But you don't see it as any different because at night, your eyes are wider open. On a bright day, the sensor increases the intensity of the light."

To make a traffic light using the smallest number of LEDs, SLR also relied on special optic lenses that give the illusion that light is evenly spread.

SLR is confident this traffic light will radically change the way power is consumed by traffic lights.

For councils, the returns from using these traffic lights would be based on various equations, chief of which is how much they pay for energy.

SLR employs 12 people and is a multi-million dollar company started in the mid-1980s. About 70 per cent of its business is exports.

Its business comes mainly from designing innovative electronic and micro-processing solutions.

Very early in the business, Mr Sintes observed a cardinal principle - to succeed, a company must be in the business of making innovative products.

"As entrepreneurs - we tended to do things which nobody has done before, if we can," Mr Sintes said.

Being innovative however presents it own set of challenges. "If you copy other people's products, things that have been made before, you already have a market to sell those products to.

"On the other hand, if you are innovative and you come up with a new product, a new design, or a new concept, you have to overcome the initial resistance to that project because there is nothing to compare it against," he added.

One of its innovations dates back to 1985. "We saw there was a world problem with neon signs, that if the glass breaks on the sign, the voltage can start arching and present a danger to the public in the risk of severe electric shock."SLR designed a system that automatically turns off the transformer on sensing safety being compromised.

"That product now has been adopted into almost every country's regulations in the world, with the exception of the US, which has its own ways," he said.

Another innovation SLR brought to the market was the creation of a slim high voltage silicon cable for neon signs which hadn't been done before.

"Neon signs are inherently powered by voltages of up to 15,000 volts. High voltage cables were previously, before we came along, as thick as your thumbs, inflexible and reasonably expensive and difficult to use.

"We ended up designing a smaller cable about 8mm in diameter, capable of carrying that voltage, which is quite flexible and sold that to the sign industry."

Setting targets and ensuring they are met is also another one of Mr Sintes' secrets of success.

"We have maintained a steady growth since 1984 and have been careful not to develop beyond our means. We have also been careful to achieve the targeted growth rate that I set for myself right from the outset.

"There is nothing like setting yourself a goal - you have to get out of your bed and do it. If you don't set a target, you have got nothing to aim for."

The company, he said, has achieved growth rates it has set and in some cases exceeded them by margins of two to three times.

One of the more high-profile products SLR has designed is the millennium countdown clock. Mr Sintes said the beauty of these clocks is that they are interfaced with GPS satellites, providing exceptional accuracy - in science jargon, one second in 30,000 years.