The Rapid Evolution of LED Lighting Technology.

All Solas Ray lighting fixtures use LED’s, that are used in different ways to produce specific results.

Early LED’s initially were designed for use with two wires that fit through two holes in a circuit board and the wires were soldered to the circuit board.
This was called through-hole mounting.
An advancement occurred with the design of an LED that had no wires. Instead, it was designed to mount on the surface of a circuit board, and this LED was referred to as a Surface Mount Design (SMD) . Without the wires and surrounding packaging of a standard LED, a surface mount LED is very small, and better handled by automated assembly equipment. Special robotic arms were developed for machines that could quickly pick up the SMD LED and place it on a circuit board, which traveled on a moving conveyor belt through an oven that soldered it to the circuit board.
These assembly machines were used for high speed, high precision placing of broad range of electronic components, not just LED’s, which included capacitors and resistors for circuit boards for computers, consumer electronics as well as industrial, medical, automotive, military and telecommunications equipment. These robotic assembly machines were called 'pick and place' machines (P&P’s) because that was what they did - pick up and place parts. They became vital parts of a new manufacturing technology: Surface Mount Technology (SMT) - which changed how all electronic devices were built.
COB LED (Chip-on-Board) makes the LED ‘package’ even more compact. The LED ‘chips’ are actually multiple (typically nine or more) small pieces cut from larger silicon wafers that are attached directly to a small ceramic or metal base to form a single module. Since the individual LEDs used in a COB are chips and not traditionally packaged, the chips can be mounted such that they take up less space. When the COB LED package is energized, it appears more like a lighting panel than multiple individual lights as the case when using several SMD LEDs.

Being multi-chip packaged, the light emitting area of a COB LED can contain many times more light sources in the same area that standard LEDs could occupy resulting in a greatly increased lumen output per square inch.
For more information, details and a short video on the advantages of COB & SMD LED lighting, visit our "Tech Journal" page, entry #27.
Bill Nagengast, Lighting Engineer
Solas Ray Lighting
Holds over 20 patents in the lighting industry.
To Opt Out and No Longer Receive this Information, Click Unsubscribe at Bottom.
TJ-45 10.4.18