6 ms·
How LEDs are Made
- leoedin 12y agoI'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.
- madengr 12y agoIt'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.
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y agoI'm not so sure. Let's assume you're paying someone $15/hour and she actually costs you $25/hour. Assuming a 10 minute break every hour (that's gotta be tiring work and you want to hold onto your employees), then that's 2500/(80 * 50) = 0.625 cents of labor cost per LED. I don't know what all the other costs are, but that one operation seems surprisingly cheap.
- DanBC 12y agoI'm stupid. EDIT: I am! Thanks for the corrections!!
- johnchristopher 12y ago> We were told they can align over 80 per minute or about 40,000 per day.
- parker94 12y agoWow that's impressive
- bluefinity 12y agoThe worker makes 80 LEDs per minute.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- gcb0 12y agothose salaries are 10% more than a target employee in california and 60% over a wallmart employee. so i think the costs per led are even lower...
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y agoLike I said, you want to hold onto your employees for more than a week ;-)
- leoedin 12y agoJust looking on Digikey, the unit price for a 5mm LED is somewhere between 3 and 4 cents. In that price there's distributor markup, transport, supply chain markup, the cost of the components and the cost of labour. I'm not too familiar with the economics of electronic components, but I'd be very surprised if the manufacturer sees more than 30% of the final price. That would mean the manufacturer would be spending half the cost of the finished product on a single step of the manufacturing process. I'd be surprised if that's economically viable.
- null_ptr 12y agoI don't envy the eyesight of the worker that has to look through a microscope their entire shift, this was sad to read.
- jpindar 12y agoHave you used an industrial quality binocular microscope? I do - though not continuously - and they're not at all unpleasant. The eyepieces are individually adjustable, as is the interocular spacing.
- sitkack 12y agoWe should make a raspberry powered microscope that can project onto a 22" HD display. It would be awesome if Lytro had a realtime USB version of their camera.
- madengr 12y agoNeeds to be steroscopic or else you'd be nailing bonds down in the wrong location. No substitute for a good stereo microscope for microelectronics work.
- gipp 12y agoI used to work as a lab tech at one of the leading US LED manufacturers, and automated tools most definitely exist for all the steps pictured here (and they were typically done in a cleanroom, as well). Can't speak to what was done in China, though.
- wintersFright 12y agoI've been watching "how it's made" tv series with my kids. That has been an eye opener on where there are lots of people doing things I assumed (ignorantly) would be automated Helps me be less of a tight ass too knowing how much manual labour is in some things!
- sparkman55 12y agoThis 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...
- pmorici 12y ago"when was the last time you saw a 7-segment display, or those big red round thru-hole LEDs" Every HP common slot server PSU has one of those round through hole LEDs on it. I have an HP server sitting here (DL580) that has two 7 segment displays on its motherboard. These things are definitely still used in modern products.
- radicalbyte 12y agoI can see 15 from here: TV, Babyphone (3) and Playstation controller (4), wife's laptop (6) and my mac charger (1).
- ANTSANTS 12y ago>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.
- jpindar 12y ago"when was the last time you saw a 7-segment display, or those big red round thru-hole LEDs" At work yesterday, at a microwave communications equipment manufacturer. Through-hole LEDs are the easiest kind to mount on the front panel of rack mount equipment. And there are 7-segment displays on two of our adjustable power supplies.
- coreymgilmore 12y agoVery 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.
- joezydeco 12y agoEveryone 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?
- DanBC 12y agoFor people who don't know 0402 is: > 0402 (1005 metric): 1.0 mm × 0.5 mm (0.039 in × 0.020 in).
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y agoAnd 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!
- deelowe 12y agoThey aren't too hard with paste and an oven/hot air.
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y agoPoint I was trying to make wasn't about reflow. Picking them up and placing by hand gets tiring after the first 2 dozen or so.
- joezydeco 12y ago
- mrfusion 12y agoI wonder how the LED dies are made?
- jmpe 12y agoSame 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)
- chrisBob 12y agoYour reasoning for the 2" wafer surprises me because most semiconductor work scales well, and the cost to buy and process larger wafers is only slightly more expensive while the surface area is much larger. A 6" wafer is 9 times as big as a 2" one.
- jmpe 12y agoA 6" wafer will also have lots of dies on the edge that don't pass automatic testing. Don't forget that most devices are located near the edge. Secondly, upgrading your Fab to switch your process to larger wafer size has a 10-figure $ price tag. It's not trivial for digital, let alone opto electronics. LEDs are special in that they deviate severely from the standard mos process. When Monsanto first produced them they almost dumped the idea for LEDs because of all the issues to deal with the exotic materials.
- tzs 12y ago> A 6" wafer will also have lots of dies on the edge that don't pass automatic testing. Don't forget that most devices are located near the edge. I don't understand this. Given a fixed size die, the number of dies near the edge would go up linearly as the wafer size goes up. The number of interior dies would go up quadratically.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoAnd 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? :-)
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y agoMake 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.
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- HeyLaughingBoy 12y agoI 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.
- DanBC 12y agoI 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.
- madengr 12y agoISO9000 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.
- ttflee 12y agoPassing these management craps are not completely meaningless. Sometimes, people do realise what was the problem during the process of producing these management craps.
- noselasd 12y ago
- carrigan 12y agoThe title here is slightly misleading- this isn't how LEDs are made, it is how LED dies are packaged. The more difficult part of all of this is creating the dies themselves, which is requires a clean room and all the automated tools I'm sure most people here were expecting to see.
- DigitalJack 12y agothis is a good link, although still high level: http://www.edisontechcenter.org/LED.html http://www.edisontechcenter.org/LED.html and a lab to get a better feel for how band gaps affect the spectrum: http://electron6.phys.utk.edu/phys250/Laboratories/Light%20emitting%20diodes.htm http://electron6.phys.utk.edu/phys250/Laboratories/Light%20e...
- johnohara 12y agoGood links indeed. And interesting. Thank you.
- Bognar 12y agoThere are so many more parts to making an LED, too. First you need the wafer that it's grown on - either silicon carbide or alumina. The latter of which requires cones to be etched down onto the growing surface which is a significant manufacturing process all on its own. The former of which requires heating SiC until it metls at 2700C and slowly pulling out a single perfect crystal cylindrical ingot. Then you have the actual crystal growth portion where you shove all those wafers into an evacuated chamber, heat them to a thousand degrees, spin them around, and spray them toxic pyrophoric gases. This process takes multiple hours to grow just a few microns of light producing crystals. Then you have to grind the wafers down to the appropriate die thickness, go through multiple stages of etching, add a phosphor for white LEDs, deposit gold and ITO for electrical contacts, and use lasers to cut them into individual die. Then, finally, you can ship them to the people in the linked article. Honestly, this article is the most boring part of the whole process. Source: I used to work in R&D for an LED manufacturer.
- xedarius 12y agoTrick of the eye there for a moment. I thought that girl in the photo had a robot LED making arm.
- brc 12y agoYeah me too. I had to do a double take.
- chrisBob 12y agoAm I the only person that thought the shape of the metal inside an LED was a significant part of the function? I am sure if I thought about it I would have realized that it is just support for the silicon. I guess I never thought about it that much until today.
- morcheeba 12y agoIf you look closely, you'll see it's actually in the shape of a reflector - usually a cone. Also not shown is that some higher-power leds use a blob of silicone around the chip to protect the bond wire during thermal expansion -- the cone helps hold the silicone while curing.
- danvoell 12y agoAm I the only one that thought Alicia had a bionic arm at first glance?
- fideloper 12y agoI want those short ties. That's awesome.
- userbinator 12y agoSimilar process, but for USB drives: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2946 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2946
- NIL8 12y agoNeat! Now, I'd like to see someone do something like this for solar panels.
- Eliezer 12y agoIf this is the manufacturing process and its price, why are LED light bulbs still expensive? (Serious question.)
- weaksauce 12y agoLed light bulbs are considerably more intense. It has to contain a power supply, heat sink, and more LEDs than just the one that gets put into the single led, and all that needs to be interconnected on a chip.
- nkurz 12y agoThese are not the type of LEDs used in modern light LED light bulbs. They produce a tiny amount of light (maybe 5 lumens each, with a 60W equivalent requiring 800 lumens), don't work well with a heat sink, and aren't particularly efficient. Separately, a lot more goes into an LED light bulb than just the LED. Here's a teardown with cost estimates for a recent 800 lumen Cree 60W equivalent, where they come up with an $8 Bill of Materials for a bulb that retails for $13: http://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/3212/cree-ba19-08027omf-12de26-1u100-led-light-bulb-teardown http://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/3212/cree-ba19-...
- sokoloff 12y agoHome Depot has been selling those lamps for $4.97ea for quite a few months now. They're a very nice replacement for the traditional A19 60W incandescents. My only complaint, and it's a tiny one, is that they only dim to about 10% before cutting off entirely. There's also a small dark spot on the spot of the bulb opposite the socket, but in practice that's been a non-issue for all my use cases.
- nkurz 12y agoIn the US, the price varies state by state, and reflects a variety of subsidies used to encourage the switch over from incandescents. Thus for certain bulbs (like this one) the production cost is often higher than the selling price. Some details for California here: http://www.designingwithleds.com/rebated-cree-philips-led-bulbs-8-ca-temporarily/ http://www.designingwithleds.com/rebated-cree-philips-led-bu...
- rikacomet 12y agoIsn't the word "dyes" the right one to use here? Instead of "dies"?
- egypturnash 12y agoA 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.
- Figs 12y agoThey're talking about this kind of "die": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_%28integrated_circuit%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_%28integrated_circuit%29 ; "dyes" are substances used to color things. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye 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.)
- quarterwave 12y agoInterestingly enough, organic LED (OLED) technology uses dyes instead of semiconductor materials. OLED display panels can be 'printed' like ink-jet printers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED