<i>I could do this in my basement!</i><p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
The 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.
I'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.
Very 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.<p>Also amazing how small the components (LED dies) are.
Am I the only person that thought the shape of the metal inside an LED was a significant part of the function?<p>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.
Similar process, but for USB drives: <a href="http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2946" rel="nofollow">http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2946</a>
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?<p>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...
And 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? :-)