How LEDs are Made
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How LEDs are Made
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Re: How LEDs are Made
#2I'm surprised by how manual the whole process is. I think labour is so expensive in the west that any manufacturing of small low value items is incredibly highly automated (see youtube for lots of videos of how huge automated production lines work). There's no way you could employ someone to manually bond 80 LEDs a minute in the west and still have a competitive product.
Re: How LEDs are Made
#3This 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...
Re: How LEDs are Made
#4Very 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.
Re: How LEDs are Made
#5I'm surprised by how manual the whole process is. I think labour is so expensive in the west that any manufacturing of small low value items is incredibly highly automated (see youtube for lots of videos of how huge automated production lines work). There's no way you could employ someone to manually bond 80 LEDs a minute in the west and still have a competitive product.
It's at least a semi-automated bonder, so once you get the step and repeat tuned in, it's usually a matter of just pushing the button and visually verifying. Still though, looking into a microscope 12 hours/day is tedious.
Re: How LEDs are Made
#6I wonder how the LED dies are made?
Re: How LEDs are Made
#7I wonder how the LED dies are made?
Same as regular chips: in a grid on a wafer, then cut and pick&placed.
Don't forget: yield goes up when the die shrinks because the defects are typically small spots. The smaller the die the better you pixelate the defects.
The wafers are only 2 inch diameter to avoid yield loss due to edge effects: at the edge of the wafer you have lowest quality components (optical ring effects)
Re: How LEDs are Made
#8And so this makes an interesting point, LED shapes are controlled by the mold makers, but when do we get just a flat thin LED and you can 3D print the shape you want on top? :-)
Re: How LEDs are Made
#9I 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 was high-tech, cleanroom work, etc. But here were little old ladies putting pieces together.
I had a similar epiphany years later when a friend told me he was buying a thermocouple manufacturing business for $20,000!!! The business consisted of two senior citizens who wanted to retire. No high-speed pick&place robots working in inert argon atmospheres, just two old people putting wire in jigs and spot-welding them together (probably in an inert atmosphere, though).
The same thing repeats itself over and over: a huge amount of what we think of as sophisticated technology is being done by hand, or by ancient machinery, in dirty, poorly lit corners of the US.
Re: How LEDs are Made
#10And so this makes an interesting point, LED shapes are controlled by the mold makers, but when do we get just a flat thin LED and you can 3D print the shape you want on top? :-)
Make a trip to your local Michael's or other art/craft store and you can do it today. Silicon sealant to make a mold + liquid molding acrylic and you're off.