With the popularity and widespread application of high-power light-emitting diode (LED) in lighting industry, its reliability has gradually become one of research focuses.The failure of gold bonding wires in the traditional LED package has been a critical bottleneck that restricts its reliability. In this paper, the failure mechanism of LED under cyclically electrical loading is firstly identified through both gold bonding wire mechanical simulation and power cycling test experiment, which is the fatigue fracture of gold bonding wire. Then, two lifetime prediction methods, the acceleration factor extraction method based on current acceleration model and the strain-based Coffin-Manson analytical method, are established and verified with experimental results. The results show that the lifetime prediction accuracy of the proposed methods is high and they can achieve a fast and accurate reliability assessment for high-power LEDs with wire-bonding packaging technology.

Manufacturing-oriented topology optimization has been extensively studied the past two decades, in particular for the conventional manufacturing methods, for example, machining and injection molding or casting. Both design and manufacturing engineers have benefited from these efforts because of the close-to-optimal and friendly-to-manufacture design solutions. Recently, additive manufacturing (AM) has received significant attention from both academia and industry. AM is characterized by producing geometrically complex components layer-by-layer, and greatly reduces the geometric complexity restrictions imposed on topology optimization by conventional manufacturing. In other words, AM can make near-full use of the freeform structural evolution of topology optimization. Even so, new rules and restrictions emerge due to the diverse and intricate AM processes, which should be carefully addressed when developing the AM-specific topology optimization algorithms. Therefore, the motivation of this perspective paper is to summarize the state-of-art topology optimization methods for a variety of AM topics. At the same time, this paper also expresses the authors’ perspectives on the challenges and opportunities in these topics. The hope is to inspire both researchers and engineers to meet these challenges with innovative solutions.

This paper studies the interaction of catastrophic failure of the driver and LED luminous flux decay for an integrated LED lamp with an electrolytic capacitor-free LED driver. Electronic thermal simulations are utilized to obtain the lamp's dynamic history of temperature and current for two distinct operation modes: constant current mode (CCM) and constant light output (CLO) mode, respectively. Driver's mean time to failure (MTTF) and the LED's lifetime in terms of luminous flux are calculated. Under CLO mode, the LED's current increases exponentially to maintain the constant light output. As a result, the junction temperatures of LEDs, MOSFETs, and power diodes in driver rise significantly, leading to a much shorter MTTF and faster luminous flux depreciation. However, under the CCM, the junction temperatures of LEDs, MOSFETs, and diodes change modestly; therefore, the driver's MTTF and LED's luminous flux decay are not affected much by the variation of temperatures during LED's degradation process.