How LEDs are made (2014)

(learn.sparkfun.com)

69 points | by smig0 2 days ago

6 comments

  • jrmg 1 hour ago
    Man, I miss photo articles like this that I can read at my leisure, without sound. Nowadays this would likely be a (probably frantic) video.
  • bhagyeshsp 13 minutes ago
    I guess I had read this article 12-13 years back. I think it was this same article.

    One of the things I vaguely remember was reading somewhere that working on this LED manufacturing severely damages the workers' eyes. I don't know how much of it is true and if it is, whether that is still the case.

  • NikolaNovak 2 hours ago
    1. 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.

    • throwup238 1 hour ago
      For context this is a 12 year old article about an outdated factory before LED die bonders got cheaper. The humans are working as glorified pick and place machines doing very repetitive motions, not manually aligning each die through a microscope. This only works because the tolerances on the placement between the die and anode/cathode are huge and the surface tension of the adhesive does most of the work.
  • londons_explore 2 hours ago
    So every LED die is manually aligned?

    Surely 10 years on that isn't true anymore??

    • sitzkrieg 1 hour ago
      no longer true indeed. comment a bit above mentions more modern automated alignments. this and things like blue leds coming down in price
  • cowthulhu 2 hours ago
    This was a lot lower-tech than I was expecting. Very cool!
  • dekdrop 1 hour ago
    [dead]