A new committee has formed to set standards for high-brightness LED (HB-LED). The committee was established by SEMI, an organization for semiconductor manufacturers (www.semi.org). The goal is to eliminate costs across the LED industry and boost innovation in equipment and processes. The committee has already set up task forces in four areas: wafers, carriers, automation, and assembly.
The wafer group will come up with standards for wafers, starting with sapphire wafers, that will limit the proliferation of different types of wafers that will lime the proliferation of different surface qualities, wafer IDs, orientations, and so forth. The carriers group will devise standards for shipping, automation, and process carriers. Shipping carriers are used to move wafers from suppliers to customers. Automation carriers hold wafers as they travel through automated manufacturing tools. And process carriers hold wafers as they go in and out of process tools that may house aggressive environments that contain chemicals, liquids, and heat.
The automation task force will come up with a standard that facilitates compatibility among different types of HB-LED equipment from different vendors. The assembly group will examine industry standards on technologies such as machine vision, device orientation. And handling interfaces, to encourage less expensive, higher-throughput assembly with the vast array of components typically used in HB-LED manufacturing.