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.
I'm not so sure. Let's assume you're paying someone $15/hour and she actually costs you $25/hour. Assuming a 10 minute break every hour (that's gotta be tiring work and you want to hold onto your employees), then that's 2500/(80 * 50) = 0.625 cents of labor cost per LED. I don't know what all the other costs are, but that one operation seems surprisingly cheap.
Just looking on Digikey, the unit price for a 5mm LED is somewhere between 3 and 4 cents. In that price there's distributor markup, transport, supply chain markup, the cost of the components and the cost of labour. I'm not too familiar with the economics of electronic components, but I'd be very surprised if the manufacturer sees more than 30% of the final price.
That would mean the manufacturer would be spending half the cost of the finished product on a single step of the manufacturing process. I'd be surprised if that's economically viable.
I used to work as a lab tech at one of the leading US LED manufacturers, and automated tools most definitely exist for all the steps pictured here (and they were typically done in a cleanroom, as well). Can't speak to what was done in China, though.
I've been watching "how it's made" tv series with my kids.
That has been an eye opener on where there are lots of people doing things I assumed (ignorantly) would be automated
Helps me be less of a tight ass too knowing how much manual labour is in some things!
It's at least a semi-automated bonder, so once you get the step and repeat tuned in, it's usually a matter of just pushing the button and visually verifying. Still though, looking into a microscope 12 hours/day is tedious.
Have you used an industrial quality binocular microscope? I do - though not continuously - and they're not at all unpleasant. The eyepieces are individually adjustable, as is the interocular spacing.
We should make a raspberry powered microscope that can project onto a 22" HD display. It would be awesome if Lytro had a realtime USB version of their camera.
Video microscopes work OK for inspection but for working under the microscope, the video delay and the lack of stereo vision are pretty intolerable. What would probably work better is a Vision Engineering eyepieceless stereo scope.
Sounds good for a second, and then you realize that it's going to induce a conflict between your visual and proprioceptive senses that'll make it impossible to work at best, and probably make you toss up your lunch besides.
Needs to be steroscopic or else you'd be nailing bonds down in the wrong location. No substitute for a good stereo microscope for microelectronics work.
Maybe, but then you've got the lag and pixilation. Seems to be a solution in search of a problem. Still nothing nicer than human eyes looking through good glass of a stereo inspection microscope. Really not even the eyes, but the same posture for hours on end hurting the neck muscles. I suppose you can get used to it, but with a wire bonder there is not much leeway in adjusting the microscope position. Then again, for a guy manually wire bonding LEDs in China, it beats toiling in a rice patty.
Even the USB microscope cameras are garbage. Much better pictures just holding a digital pocket camera up to the eyepiece.
