I sacrificed a thumb for this LED?

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rjlittlefield
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I sacrificed a thumb for this LED?

Post by rjlittlefield »

Well, no, actually the thumb was dead to start with.

Yep -- wouldn't write, wouldn't format. Completely useless thumb drive. :roll:

So of course I surgically removed the case so I could see what was inside.

Here's what I found...

Image

Most of this stuff I can't even identify for sure. It's a far cry from the good old days when there were tubes with honest-to-goodness filaments that got red hot, and grids that you could actually see, and all the resistors had pretty colored stripes around them. :lol:

I did find the LED though. It's at the extreme right side.

Rotated 90 degrees CCW and made a lot bigger, this is what it looks like:

Image

Kinda purty, I think. Just in case you were tired of all those bugs and things, I mean... Silver and gold and green...the colors of Christmas and all that. :D

Hope you enjoy!

--Rik

Technical: Canon 300D. Image #1 using 80 mm Olympus bellow macro lens at f/11. Image #2 using 10X NA 0.25 objective, stacked at 0.00025" focus step, halogen dual fiber with pingpong ball diffuser. LED covered with thin layer of oil to smooth the surface.

Ken Ramos
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Post by Ken Ramos »

Fust time I ever seen one'a dee'se close-up? I am familiar with diodes but not light emitting ones...so, where does the light come from? Evidently they don't get hot and all that or do they? :-k

DaveW
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Post by DaveW »

A deceased friend of mine used to be a radio officer in the Army in WWII. He said he could trace any circuit when it used valves (tubes) but was unsure about the new integrated circuits using microchips etc because he could not trace the path through them. He asked a friend who was up on modern electronics how you traced the circuit path through these? His friends reply was "only the chip designer knows that, you only have to know what tag to connect to these days!".

DaveW

JoanYoung
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Post by JoanYoung »

Well this certainly is different Rik!! :lol:
Joan Young

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Post by beetleman »

A very interesting subject Rik. I finally realized where your extreme closeup was on the first picture. This is through the clear plastic or glass of the diode :shock: I remember going down to the local drug store as a kid with a tube my father wanted me to check to get the TV up and running again. :wink:
Take Nothing but Pictures--Leave Nothing but Footprints.
Doug Breda

jmlphoto
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Post by jmlphoto »

looks like a pile of silver is sweeping another pile off the edge.
Jordan L. photo southern california.

MacroLuv
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Post by MacroLuv »

DaveW wrote:... He asked a friend who was up on modern electronics how you traced the circuit path through these? His friends reply was "only the chip designer knows that, you only have to know what tag to connect to these days!".
DaveW
And you would hardly get an answer from designer. The designer is not a single person I bet. :-k
The meaning of beauty is in sharing with others.

P.S.
Noticing of my "a" and "the" and other grammar
errors are welcome. :D

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Post by rjlittlefield »

Thanks for the comments, folks! :D
Ken Ramos wrote:Fust time I ever seen one'a dee'se close-up? I am familiar with diodes but not light emitting ones...so, where does the light come from? Evidently they don't get hot and all that or do they? :-k
Ken, it's not nearly such a close view, but go take a look at this "Christmas LED" post over in the old forums. The light comes from a thin layer just below where the contact wire connects.

The light from an LED is produced directly from electricity at low temperature. You could embed the raw chip in ice instead of plastic, and still get light. However, the conversion from electricity to light is not very efficient, typically only about as good as an ordinary incandescent bulb. The wasted electricity does get turned into heat, and you have to draw that heat off as fast as it is produced or the LED rapidly overheats and fails. The big difference from an incandescent bulb is that with the LED, high temperature is an unnecessary and undesirable side effect, rather than a required part of how it works.

Joan, I like to play with a lot of different kinds of subjects. Poke through my old postings, and you'll find a broad mix: insects, flowers, seeds, lichen, spiders, rocks, concrete, protozoa, polished wood, leaf veins, a badly machined setscrew, some waterlice, frost spikes, and a bunch of equipment shots. I got interested in closeup/macro photography to do insects, but now pretty much anything is fair game.

Doug, I thought the two photos made a nice pair. I did just the LED first, then realized that even with the scale bar, there was no good sense of just how small that thing is! Showing the whole board helps, but in retrospect I ought to have thrown in a third one to really put the size in context. Oh, what the heck -- let's do it now!

Image
jmlphoto wrote:looks like a pile of silver is sweeping another pile off the edge.
It does, doesn't it? I presume that silver stuff is some kind of solder. But I'm surprised at how crystalline it looks. You can see on the side of the black slab and on the end of the gold wire, there are even some tiny isolated spots of silver, as if the stuff were sprayed on and a few drops scattered off to the side. Direct view through the microscope gives the same impression, maybe even stronger. I have no idea how these things are actually manufactured.
MacroLuv wrote:
DaveW wrote:... He asked a friend who was up on modern electronics how you traced the circuit path through these? His friends reply was "only the chip designer knows that, you only have to know what tag to connect to these days!".
And you would hardly get an answer from designer. The designer is not a single person I bet.
In a high density chip, it may be that no human knows exactly what goes where on the physical chip. Final routing and layout is usually done by software. Sometimes whole blocks are constructed by software based on functional specifications. If a human really wants to know, she looks it up on a map produced by the software!

--Rik

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Post by MacroLuv »

rjlittlefield wrote:... In a high density chip, it may be that no human knows exactly what goes where on the physical chip. Final routing and layout is usually done by software. Sometimes whole blocks are constructed by software based on functional specifications. If a human really wants to know, she looks it up on a map produced by the software!

--Rik
What I said! Artificial intelligence will prevaill! :shock:
Rik, is there any particular reason you wrote she?
Lets be clear, I have nothing against she - technicians. O:)
Another bait? :lol:
The meaning of beauty is in sharing with others.

P.S.
Noticing of my "a" and "the" and other grammar
errors are welcome. :D

Erland R.N.
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Post by Erland R.N. »

wow, that 2nd photo was quite surprising and interesting.

Erland

Ken Ramos
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Post by Ken Ramos »

You know this has nothing to do with the photograph but I just cannot help but to imagine some sort of personal abuse by the title of the post. :lol:

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

MacroLuv wrote:
rjlittlefield wrote:If a human really wants to know, she looks it up on a map produced by the software!
Rik, is there any particular reason you wrote she? ... Another bait? :lol:
Yep, and it worked great! :D

Gender stereotyping is something that I think about often, and sometimes I play with the language to see how it feels. In standard English, one person of unknown gender is normally called "he", unless because of occupation or role the person is most likely "she". To be neutral, an author can write "they", but then pedants complain about the mismatch in number if talking about only one person. Of course one can write "he or she", but that spends three words and obviously breaks the flow. Or one can write "s/he", but that is visually ugly and when spoken sounds just like "she" anyway. Or one can punt the whole issue, go with "they" and change the number to keep the pedants happy: "If humans really want to know, they look it up on a map produced by the software!"

I tried the sentence all of these ways, and eventually decided to go with "she" just because, well, actually I don't know why. Perhaps just because it does sound a bit odd.

I am bothered that it sounds odd, even to me, since at the lab where I work my group leader is a "she", and so is my product line manager, and the clients of my previous project, and the chancellor of the university where I teach, and my department's academic advisors, and well over half the students in my math class, and so on. The oddness is puzzling...and therefore something to be played with. :?
Ken Ramos wrote:I just cannot help but to imagine some sort of personal abuse by the title of the post.
Excellent -- so that part is working well too! 8)
Erland R.N. wrote:wow, that 2nd photo was quite surprising and interesting
Thanks, Erland! It struck me that way too, when I first put the LED under a microscope. I am fascinated that even at this magnification, the gold-plated wire looks so very smooth -- except of course for the visible crumpling on the inside of the bend.

--Rik

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