Neat, I was expecting more about how the semiconductor part is made. I toured the Lumileds/Phillips fab that closed in San Jose but you can't really see much.
How LEDs are made (2014)
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Re: How LEDs are made (2014)
#12Neat, I was expecting more about how the semiconductor part is made. I toured the Lumileds/Phillips fab that closed in San Jose but you can't really see much.
You could probably see more if they used their own product.
Re: How LEDs are made (2014)
#13Man, I miss photo articles like this that I can read at my leisure, without sound. Nowadays this would likely be a (probably frantic) video.
A non-frantic (related) video worth the watch:
Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED
Re: How LEDs are made (2014)
#14So every LED die is manually aligned? Surely 10 years on that isn't true anymore??
I doubt it would even be true 10 years ago. This article is from small-mid scale led production.
Re: How LEDs are made (2014)
#15China has improved a lot in commerical, high power LED. 10 years ago, they could not even touch the performance of CREE or Luxeon or Osram LEDs, now thay are on par in term of performace, and much cheaper.
Re: How LEDs are made (2014)
#16Back at Caltech, one of the students realized that the only thing limiting the brightness of an LED was heat dissipation. So, he dipped an LED into liquid nitrogen, and cranked up the current. It got pretty bright before it melted.
Naturally, he realized that the clear plastic blob it was inside was an insulator. How to fix - he filed it down to the bare minimum that would hold it together. This time, it would light up a whole room!
Liquid nitrogen is all one needs to make bright LEDs.
Re: How LEDs are made (2014)
#17Back at Caltech, one of the students realized that the only thing limiting the brightness of an LED was heat dissipation. So, he dipped an LED into liquid nitrogen, and cranked up the current. It got pretty bright before it melted. Naturally, he realized that the clear plastic blob it was inside was an insulator. How to fix - he filed it down to the bare minimum that would hold it together. This time, it would light…
People dedome their LEDs regularly these days for a different colour tint and beam profile. I never considered what it did to the thermal profile.
Re: How LEDs are made (2014)
#18Man, I miss photo articles like this that I can read at my leisure, without sound. Nowadays this would likely be a (probably frantic) video.
A non-frantic (related) video worth the watch: Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M
I remember reading about the Blue LED when it first started to appear. It was interesting reading what they thought how it would be used at the time with being able to do true R/G/B the thing everyone was talking about. Not sure how much later before they were used for shiny round discs but it wasn't part of the article's prognostications. This is all a bit nostalgic as I read about that in a printed magazine when those were still a thing.
Re: How LEDs are made (2014)
#191. Fascinating overall 2. "they can align over 80 per minute or about 40,000 per day." - terrifying, as I assume this is a metric workers are held against :O 80 per minute is less than a second for what sounds like several movements - move the die over, align, push down, move it out. While your eye is stuck to the microscope.
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Re: How LEDs are made (2014)
#20Back at Caltech, one of the students realized that the only thing limiting the brightness of an LED was heat dissipation. So, he dipped an LED into liquid nitrogen, and cranked up the current. It got pretty bright before it melted. Naturally, he realized that the clear plastic blob it was inside was an insulator. How to fix - he filed it down to the bare minimum that would hold it together. This time, it would light…
>... to make bright WHITEish LEDs.
While I'll readily admit to remembering nothing from her class, I took physical chemistry [πchem] from one of the co-inventors [2] of white LEDs. This is where my own limited fleshtelligence began searching for Heisenberg's god...
[πchem] e.g: how metals behave when struck with electron[-like thing]s)
[2] ONE of two known-methods, then
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But yes, once any process exists, it's usually only a matter of heat management to keep it working full wall-slam-ed-ly [ƒpu]
[ƒpu] which is why to run GPU fanspeeds high enough to keep if they'll then last forever; change your car's oil (and keep topped-up)