News

Courtesy of LEDs Magazine

On 26 January, Philips Lumileds of San Jose, CA, USA restarted production of certain Luxeon Rebel and Luxeon K2 LEDs containing TFFC die, ahead of the expected date of March.

Lumileds said in mid-January that it had halted production of the devices, and issued a Return Request Action to all affected customers for devices made between 28 October 2007 and 12 January 2008.

Lumileds has now diagnosed contamination in a batch of epoxy used in the flip-chip packaging process at its Malaysian plant . The ‘non-conforming’ epoxy had the potential to cause the TFFC LED die to crack and fail during short-term operation. The defective epoxy has now been replaced with fresh supplies.

During the pause in production, Lumileds continued to manufacture TFFC chips, so that it could rapidly restart the TFFC packaging line after testing, corrective action and qualification.

Using the fresh epoxy (which performs as expected) products are being manufactured and quarantined in the firm’s Finished Goods Inventory, where they will wait for the completion of Outgoing Quality Assurance testing. This includes accelerated reliability testing and various other performance tests.

Lumileds has told its customers that final qualification is expected on or before 28 February. Device shipments are now expected to begin again in the first week of March.

See related item:

Lumileds recalls TFFC Luxeons and halts packaging until March

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