Back 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.
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.
For context this is a 12 year old article about an outdated factory before LED die bonders got cheaper.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.
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.
China 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.
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.
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.
Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M
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.
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.
Surely 10 years on that isn't true anymore??