How LEDs are made (2014)

Discussion (6 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jrmg•36 minutes 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.

NikolaNovak•about 1 hour 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•37 minutes 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For context this is a 12 year old article about an outdated factory before LED die bonders got cheaper.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•about 1 hour ago

So every LED die is manually aligned?

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

sitzkrieg•17 minutes 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•about 1 hour ago

This was a lot lower-tech than I was expecting. Very cool!

How LEDs are made (2014)

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Discussion (6 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews