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How LEDs are Made

learn.sparkfun.com

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Re: How LEDs are Made

#71

Post by madengr »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #30
DanBC wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people who don't know 0402 is: > 0402 (1005 metric): 1.0 mm × 0.5 mm (0.039 in × 0.020 in).

And they suck to do manually. I started this morning off by hand-stuffing some PC boards with (among other parts) 19x 0402 resistors per board. There was a reason I did it before I had any coffee!

Ha ha, try hand placing 01005. Literally specs of black pepper. Must use ceramic tweezers due to residual magnetism in even the highest quality, demagnetized stainless. I was placing them between BGA balls to solve a noise issue.

The lady I have hand building my boards can place 0201 all day. Pretty amazing.

Re: How LEDs are Made

#72

Post by madengr »

DanBC wrote: post #13
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #9

I could do this in my basement! Years ago I answered a "for sale" newspaper ad for used office desks and some test equipment. I showed up at the address and it was a small dingy old building and most of the employees seemed to be 55+ year-old women. When I asked what they did and was told they made diodes, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Like he did, I assumed that all electronics parts manufacturing w…

I ised to work in electronic subcontract engineering. They had some automation (little pick and place machine with oven and screen printer; a flow oven for populated PCBs) but there was a lot of work done by hand. It was a terrible time of my life and it informs a lot of my opinion about poor management and inefficient working and about ISO900x quality assurance systems.

ISO9000 just means you must document that management crap on it's employees. As long as your crappy processes are documented, you are good-to-go.

Re: How LEDs are Made

#73

Post by madengr »

DanBC wrote: post #47
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they suck to do manually. I started this morning off by hand-stuffing some PC boards with (among other parts) 19x 0402 resistors per board. There was a reason I did it before I had any coffee!

The company I ised to work for would sometimes buy components from RS. They'd supply them in strips of 10, 50, or 100. The pick and place machine needed blank strip of about ten components (just for lead-in on the cassete). Transfering components from one tape to another was really annoying. And one of the bosses just did not understand that the fractions of a penny saved were obliterated by time wasted moving compon…

Yep #00 Swiss tweezers. Nothing like them. The feel of the #00 is just right.

Re: How LEDs are Made

#74

Post by [deleted] »

madengr wrote: post #71
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they suck to do manually. I started this morning off by hand-stuffing some PC boards with (among other parts) 19x 0402 resistors per board. There was a reason I did it before I had any coffee!

Ha ha, try hand placing 01005. Literally specs of black pepper. Must use ceramic tweezers due to residual magnetism in even the highest quality, demagnetized stainless. I was placing them between BGA balls to solve a noise issue. The lady I have hand building my boards can place 0201 all day. Pretty amazing.

[deleted]

Re: How LEDs are Made

#76

Post by egypturnash »

rikacomet wrote: post #67

Isn't the word "dyes" the right one to use here? Instead of "dies"?

A dye is a colorful substance you soak things in to color them.

A die is either a regular polyhedron with numbers on it, used in games, or a device for cutting/molding metal into a specific shape.

Re: How LEDs are Made

#77

Post by Figs »

rikacomet wrote: post #67

Isn't the word "dyes" the right one to use here? Instead of "dies"?

They're talking about this kind of "die": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_%28integrated_circuit%29 ; "dyes" are substances used to color things. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye )

The book referenced as the first source on the "die" wikipedia link claims:

> The plural of die is dice. However, it has become standard practice in the industry to use "die" as the plural.

As a native speaker of English, I'd find any of "die", "dies", or "dice" to be pretty reasonable as long as it's clear what's referred to from context. (I'd prefer "dies" over "dice" if it's not immediately clear that you're not talking about playing dice, for example.)

Re: How LEDs are Made

#78

Post by ttflee »

madengr wrote: post #72
DanBC wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ised to work in electronic subcontract engineering. They had some automation (little pick and place machine with oven and screen printer; a flow oven for populated PCBs) but there was a lot of work done by hand. It was a terrible time of my life and it informs a lot of my opinion about poor management and inefficient working and about ISO900x quality assurance systems.

ISO9000 just means you must document that management crap on it's employees. As long as your crappy processes are documented, you are good-to-go.

Passing these management craps are not completely meaningless. Sometimes, people do realise what was the problem during the process of producing these management craps.

Re: How LEDs are Made

#79

Post by ANTSANTS »

sparkman55 wrote: post #3

This is clearly an old process - when was the last time you saw a 7-segment display, or those big red round thru-hole LEDs, outside of hobby electronics? I'd be very curious to see how this process differs from the high-power lighting LED manufacturing process (e.g. CREE), which is a more modern technology by several decades. I would guess there is much more of the automation people are expecting...

>This is clearly an old process - when was the last time you saw a 7-segment display, or those big red round thru-hole LEDs, outside of hobby electronics?

Remember folks, there is a world outside of Silicon Valley.

Re: How LEDs are Made

#80

Post by pling »

joezydeco wrote: post #11
coreymgilmore wrote: post #4

Very surprising how manual this is, unless this is just for the purpose of showing how the LEDs are made. I would have expected everything in this process to be automated since electronic component manufacturing is very high volume. Also amazing how small the components (LED dies) are.

Everyone else has moved on to 0402-sized surface mount LEDs a long time ago. Could this manual process just be because nobody is building the old through-hole LEDs in massive quantities?

You're probably right. However there is a big market for quality through hole LEDs in non-mass produced consumer crap (read industrial electronics and test gear for example) so some of the big guys still produce. However when someone picks out a BOM for a production run from Farnell and there's a 0.05 no brand LED and a 0.25 Kingbright through hole, the no brand wins every time.

(says me who just bought 200 for a small prod run). So that's £10 or £50 out of the budget. Thanks to cheap LED guys, I can take my family out for that extra £40 :)

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