I remember reading about the Blue LED when it first started to appear. It was interesting reading what they thought how it would be used at the time with being able to do true R/G/B the thing everyone was talking about. Not sure how much later before they were used for shiny round discs but it wasn't part of the article's prognostications. This is all a bit nostalgic as I read about that in a printed magazine when those were still a thing.
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.
While I'll readily admit to remembering nothing from her class, I took physical chemistry [πchem] from one of the co-inventors [2] of white LEDs. This is where my own limited fleshtelligence began searching for Heisenberg's god...
[πchem] e.g: how metals behave when struck with electron[-like thing]s)
[2] ONE of two known-methods, then
----
But yes, once any process exists, it's usually only a matter of heat management to keep it working full wall-slam-ed-ly [ƒpu]
[ƒpu] which is why to run GPU fanspeeds high enough to keep <65°C – don't care about the noisiness if they'll then last forever; change your car's oil (and keep topped-up)
The average person knows literally nothing about semiconductors. I would say it’s not very intuitive how diodes work, unless you’re an electrical engineer.
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For context this is a 12 year old article about an outdated factory before LED die bonders got cheaper.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.
Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M
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.
While I'll readily admit to remembering nothing from her class, I took physical chemistry [πchem] from one of the co-inventors [2] of white LEDs. This is where my own limited fleshtelligence began searching for Heisenberg's god...
[πchem] e.g: how metals behave when struck with electron[-like thing]s)
[2] ONE of two known-methods, then
----
But yes, once any process exists, it's usually only a matter of heat management to keep it working full wall-slam-ed-ly [ƒpu]
[ƒpu] which is why to run GPU fanspeeds high enough to keep <65°C – don't care about the noisiness if they'll then last forever; change your car's oil (and keep topped-up)
It takes studying at Caltech to realize semiconductors output are limited by their heat generation? I thought everyone knew this.
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??