Most LED lighting designers believe that all LED chips have same quality. However, there are hundreds of thousands of LED chip providers or LED chip manufacturers. Asian LED Lights manufacturers can produce the cheapest LED chips all around the world. But, to buyers’ astonishment, only very few of them can actually make high quality LED chips. Low level LED chips can only be competent in small lamp market. But in other application area, in which LED products should be used under severe environment (expressway, military/aviation, other industry), high quality LED chips are necessary.
For new comers in LED industry, how to judge the quality of LED products became one of the must-to-be-learned subjects. In fact, choosing high quality LED chips is the first step. Currently, the internationally recognized best LED chip manufacturer is CREE. Chips made by CREE have a common property of high lighting efficiency. Compare with other LED chips with the same power consumption, like Epistar, SAMSUMG, CREE chips will have more than 5%-10% luminous flux. And also, CREE chips have less light attenuation, which means, the actual service life of their chips is longer than the estimated 50000 hours.
If taking chip materials and manufacturing process into account, the most advanced wafer fabrication process must be the essential point. A 2-inch wafer can be cut into more than 6000 LED chips. Using one wafer, a good manufacturer can limited the differences of chips within a very slight region in almost every aspect (chip color, brightness, voltage drop). The differences can only be generated during the packaging process. Low quality LED chips will have huge differences in properties during the chip-cutting process, not to mention the packaging process. Thus LED chips generated by small factories are kind of mixtures without any classifications.
Best LED chip manufacturers not only produce high quality LED chips, but also perform classified packaging according to basic LED chip parameters: color, brightness, potential drop, and optic angle. A good LED street light chip suppliers will provide their customers with unified products (with much similar basic parameters).
In application area which high quality chips were required, like boundary lights on the airport runway, must reach FAA level certificate. In order to avoid significant accidents, mix-packaged products with much worse uniformity cannot be used.