Quantifying the impact of performance improvements and cost reductions from 20 years of light-emitting diode manufacturing

With the aim of identifying and quantifying the principal sources of performance improvements and cost reductions in white light emitting diode manufacturing, we collect historical data on device cost and performance, technological breakthroughs and manufacturing innovation for phosphor-converted white light-emitting diodes for the past 20 years. We find that technological breakthroughs and process innovation contributed to performance improvements across the entire range of LED device sub-efficiencies, resulting in the overall increase in the lamp efficiency for the highest performing devices at a test current of 350mA from 5.8% to 38.7% between 2002 and 2020. We further develop a bottom-up manufacturing cost model with process-step resolution that captures improvements in throughput, yield and related costs of all relevant manufacturing steps, as well as economies of scale, to analyse progress in LED manufacturing cost structure between early manufacturing in 2002 and mature industry in 2020. We estimate that the cost of manufacturing low-power and mid-power light-emitting diode packages at a US location using state-of-the-art equipment has dropped from 1.11$(2020) in 2002 to 0.05$(2020) in 2020, a 95.5% decrease. We also find that the largest contribution to overall cost reduction has come from increase in wafer size, and that in 2020, LED chip packaging is the largest contributor to cost at 60%.