Dr. Semiconductor, who built a semiconductor cleanroom in a backyard shed, has fabricated working LED chips using his home equipment. Rather than buying LEDs and building a circuit around them, the project processes the light-emitting semiconductor itself, packages the resulting chips on circuit boards, and finishes them as white LEDs.

The process starts with a gallium-nitride LED wafer on sapphire. An ultraviolet laser bought on eBay is used for machining, metal contacts are deposited, the wafer is cut into individual chips, and the dies are bonded to custom boards. Phosphor is then added to turn the blue emission into white light.