Intelligent Illumination LED Technology Platform

The main types of LED used in today's products are surface mount and through hole. Through Hole LEOs are
very inefficient, usually only allowing a few 10s of milliamps to be passed through them before overheating and failing. Surprisingly
however, even today, many lamp manufacturers still use vast quantities of these LEOs in series and parallel circuits to act together to form
an overall illuminator.
Although cheap they are generally inefficient, short lived, corrode internally, of poor output capabilities
and due to EU compliance legislation are difficult to dispose of. In addition they are incredibly inefficient
at dissipating heat from the body of the device as to use them requires a through-hole PCB in the
traditional sense. When used in assemblies these are typically accompanied by very large elaborate
heat sinks machined or extruded from aluminium. The main drawback of this is that the whole
assembly is too expensive to repair should it fail and in addition can only produce one colour of light.
Despite all of these failings however the industry relies on vast quantities of these illuminators today, as
throw away lights of 2 - 5 year life span costing from a few to several hundreds of pounds each, this
inefficient practice in reality counters the "green" argument for their original use.
Surface Mount, although a great leap forward both in terms of efficiency and output these packages still suffer from the same issues of its
through hole predecessor. They still come in a package, require soldering, suffer from poor heat dissipation (although are an improvement)
corrode and are, conversely, very expensive sometimes to several pounds each.
However, the use of surface mount packages has brought about aluminium-clad assemblies, a
revolution in PCB technology, which has only recenUy hit the commercial stage. Despite this, some of
the old failings still remain and in some cases have worsened. For example, the assembly of the
aluminium clad requires specialist processes and tooling to raise the temperature of the entire board
to around 320 degrees before components can be soldered to them. The components are still
soldered, which again causes yet another junction through which heat must be dissipated and due to
this they are even less serviceable than the through hole units. Although the boards are, new they still
use the same heavy aluminium heat sinks and techniques and sold as a throw away item.
However, where output illumination is the principle consideration the use of surface mount packages is where the current in-direct
competition resides, with only very small increases in power output being realised in each individual case between competitor
manufacturers.