An anonymous reader writes “The SparkFun team took a tour of a factory in China that manufactures LEDs. They took lots of pictures showing the parts that go into the LEDs, the machines used to build them, and the people operating the machines. There’s a surprising amount of manual labor involved with making LEDs. Quoting: ‘As shipped on the paper sheets, the LED dies are too close together to manipulate. There is a mechanical machine … that spreads the dies out and sticks them to a film of weak adhesive. This film is suspended above the lead frames … Using a microscope, the worker manually aligns the die, and, with a pair of tweezers, pokes the die down into the lead frame. The adhesive in the lead frame wins (is more sticky), and the worker quickly moves to the next die. We were told they can align over 80 per minute or about 40, 000 per day.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How LEDs Are Made
Material scientists have watched crystals grow atom-by-atom for the first time —which will allow incredibly fine-grained control of how their microscopic structures are grown in the future. Read more… 
New submitter ghack writes “NuScale power, a small nuclear power company in Corvallis Oregon, has won a Department of Energy grant of up to $226 million dollars to enable deployment of their small modular reactor. The units would be factory built in the United States, and their small size enables a number of potential niche applications. NuScale argues that their design includes a number of unique passive safety features: ‘NuScale’s 45-megawatt reactor, which can be grouped with others to form a utility-scale plant, would sit in a 5 million-gallon pool of water underground. That means it needs no pumps to inject water to cool it in an emergency – an issue … highlighted by Japan’s crippled Fukushima plant.’ This was the second of two DOE small modular reactor grants; the first was awarded to Babcock and Wilcox, a stalwart in the nuclear industry.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
JoshMST writes “Why are we in the middle of GPU-renaming hell? AMD may be releasing a new 28-nm Hawaii chip in the next few days, but it is still based on the same 28-nm process that the original HD 7970 debuted on nearly two years ago. Quick and easy (relative terms) process node transitions are probably a thing of the past. 20-nm lines applicable to large ASICs are not being opened until mid-2014. ‘AMD and NVIDIA will have to do a lot of work to implement next generation features without breaking transistor budgets. They will have to do more with less, essentially. Either that or we will just have to deal with a much slower introduction of next generation parts.’ It’s amazing how far the graphics industry has come in the past 18 years, but the challenges ahead are greater than ever.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
