How LEDs are made (2014)

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wonder why some leds have a high TDP and if even that it is efficienty and how it could be fixed...

So every LED die is manually aligned?

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

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

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