Been to China?

2. February 2010 by Brent.

We recently went to China to review some of our manufacturing processes. You ever sat on a plane for 12 hours? I’m 7’ tall. This is the first memory of the trip. Airplanes just aren’t designed for people.I imagined that there would be beautiful ornate buildings, and a lot of culture. Well, to my surprise, the area we were in (Shenzhen) which is primarily a manufacturing mecca, was just a lot of concrete.

Have you ever seen how LED’s are made? Little keebler elves?

They start with small chips of material (usually from Japan) on a little plastic sheet. The chips are cut from a wafer, and one 2”      diameter wafer cans thousands of these chips. And they look through a microscope and scrape this chip into the tip of the LED element on a row of 20 at a time. This chip decides what type of light output, quality, and angle the LED will have. They do this manually for thousands of LED’s. Rooms full of people. The can do automated, but the machinery only makes sense for LED’s in the Tens of Millions. Makes my eyes hurt to watch, but then again I’m old.

Next, they put the stamped, 20 LEDs with the chips, into this machine which adds a little gold filament to bridge between the two elements. 

Are you asleep yet?

Epoxy is then poured into moulds, and the 20 LEDs are put into the mould. They use a manual version of it (but there are automated machines).

Lastly the LED’s are run through a sorter that analyzes every LED for various parameters, such as current, forward voltage, Candela output (brightness), etc.

Then it’s shipped to us, and we build light therapy products, or whatever.

A lot goes into the quality and performance of the LED’s as not all LED’s are created equal. They are all different since and quality wafers, epoxies, gold, etc. We tested hundreds of different manufactures and products, to come to the one that hit the output we needed.

There are a lot of lower output Light therapy systems on the market today, that don’t do much but blink pretty colors. I’m sure I’ll catch flack from that, but….

China’s a nice place to visit with some great food, but there’s no place like home. That’s it. No political or astounding cultural statements. Just LED’s.

By the way, why on earth do we use LED’s for light therapy? Maybe a next topic.

Brent

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