Trend of LED Manufacturing

Trend of Package Size
The Trend is going for high performance Ceramic base small footprint LED at 3mmx 3mm. Cree Xlamp is 3.45mm x 3.45mm, Not sure if Lumileds Rebel will set a new standard in future. Rebel package size is 3.62mm x4.61mm. Oslon of Osram 3 mm x 3mm x 1.6 mm (Smallest).

Trend of Wafer Size
The 6” wafer was recently been an hot topics and seems that many US, Japanese and European LED players are ready to go for it. As the large wafer will definite produce more LED and at lower cost of 30% estimated!

The industry requires the equipment suppliers to synchronize with the LED Development. We have been saying the front end is developing faster than the back end. I think that is true.

Trend of Package
Traditionally that individual company has it own design and that has been gone through 10 years market test. There are so many people who partly are copy cats and partly are LED makers with good performance chip. Though the thermal performance may not as good as the original but they are selling much cheaper, so the market has been segregated into two sectors: one is high end that has strength on output and thermal performance and naturally higher in price, the other is the rest major users that may not require higher thermal performance but the cost is just 40% or less than the original. So thee two market segments have been well defined now. The ratio is about 80:20. For those High End Packages from EU and USA, if the cost is not able to further driven down to an intermediate level, they will be facing tough competitons for Similar package made by Taiwanese and Chinese.

So many of these companies are focusing for new development on ceramic small foot print LED.

Trend of the Material
The use of larger panel of Ceramic Substrates has a better cost advantage as the larger the panel say form 4” to 6 there is an added cost but not in direct proportional to the area of the material. The advantage of larger than has a more significant saving on the machine utilization time as output indexing does lower the output of the unit. More saving will be the Process time for Silicone Liquid mounding as typical mould time is in 5-10 mins, and if the LED panel is 4” would be saving a lot of time for the Machine by comparing with 2” which has only 25% of the LED of 4” Panel.

Trend of process
There is a need for high thermal performance on LED as to minimize the thermal drift, as this drift causes instability of the colour Wave Length, and Efficacy. Now 85% of the LED is now manufactured by Epoxy process, and there are numerous ways for trying to define itself for a better process. Solder is one of them and through studies that there will be more benefit by using Solder.

Let's watch out for a couple of years for a better die bonding process that can provide better, cheaper and brighter LED. The End users will be beneficiary.