HighDi explains - what you always wanted to know about LED's ...

The term LED is an indispensable part of today's language. But very few people know about the development of "Light Emitting Diode" - short LED. Learn interesting facts about the LED. Enjoy the high quality LED technology with its long lifespan. Enjoy the high quality LED technology with its long lifespan. Please find our fantastic LED product range in our LED online shop. For further questions, quotes, advice and support please contact us via email on info@highlight-led.de.

When did it all start?
The official year when LED’s were manufactured industrially was 1962. It reached a luminous efficacy of only 0.1 lumen per watt and had a range of colors from red to yellow.

But the development began more than 80 years earlier - in 1876.

1876 bis 1935
The German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun (1850-1918) described in 1876 in a lecture his observations in an attempt which he had performed. He pressed a metal tip in a sulfide crystal and found that the crystal passes in one direction, the more power is applied, while in the other direction very little current flows. He had thus discovered the rectifier effect, but which did not fit in that time, because only Ohm conductors and insulators were known. Thus, this discovery was forgotten. ...

What happened next? Read the full story in our blog.

The structure of a LED

A wired LED (standard LED) consists of the following components: a semiconductor device, a reflector, a cathode, an anode and a plastic lens.

The semiconductor device (e.g. Silicon) is soldered on the bottom of a cone-shaped recess. The inside of the groove serves as a reflector when current is flowing. For the electrical connection tinned steel is used, the longer legs of the LED represents the positive pole (anode) and the shorter legs of the LED negative pole (cathode). The reflector with the semiconductor device is connected by the solder joint with the cathode. By a thin connecting wire (bonding wire) the upper surface of the semiconductor device is connected to the anode. To fix all the components an LED is surrounded with a plastic lens (see picture).

Which other LED's are there?  Read the full story in our blog.

The variety of colors of LED

The spectrum of visible light covers only a very small range of about 370nm (violet) to 760nm (red).

Due to the very compact design and the large color spectrum LED’s are specialists for white and colored light. Your imagination how to use LED’s are set no bounds for example, architectural lighting, in restaurants, bars and discos, as an effect in illuminated advertising, in your home, garden, at work, building sites and much more. The light-emitting color of an LED is dependent on the composition of the installed semiconductor material. There are light radiation in the near UV, generated in the visible or in the infrared range. The first commercial LED's lit blue. Here was silicon carbide used as semiconductor material.

Would you like to know more?  Read the full story in our blog.