Bridgelux CEO shines (San Francisco)

By his own admission, Bill Watkins is an acquired taste.

The infamously outspoken and colorful former chief of Seagate Technology has bounced back from his 2009 firing at the Scotts Valley hard-drive manufacturer to head Bridgelux, a startup LED lighting company on which investors have already made big bets.

The company has raised $125 million in venture capital and moved its headquarters to Livermore, where it’s opening a 120,000-square-foot fab plant for making integrated circuits, the first in the region in 25 years. It will transfer manufacturing from its Sunnyvale office to Livermore throughout the next three months.

Bridgelux on March 24 launched an LED product called Helion, which it codeveloped with Lisle, Ill.-based Molex. The product — which includes the $20 LED — is easy to install and can be used in recessed lighting in homes or commercial buildings or in architectural lighting. The product reduces electricity use by 80 percent compared with incandescents and is brighter and cheaper than products from its main competitor GE.

The Helion has special features, like the ablity to change beam angles, that “make it more flexible” than anything on the market today, said Vrinda Bhandarkar, an LED industry analyst at Strategies Unlimited, a research firm in Mountain View.

Read the full story in the San Francisco Business Times.