LED (light emitting diode) lights, are electronic marvels. An LED can do many types of jobs. You'll find an LED as light in many devices, such as digital clocks, remote control devices, watch faces, appliances, traffic lights and TVs.

LED lights are miniscule sized bulbs that are small enough to fit into electrical circuitry. They don't have a filament that is going to burn out, which is where they differ from your standard incandescent light bulb. The other difference is that they don't give off heat. What illuminates LED lights are internal electron movements. The life of LED lights is comparable to the life of transistors.

The basic part of the LED lights, the diode, is a semiconductor in its simplest form. A semiconductor is material that conducts electric current but with variations in strength. A semiconductor is usually composed of a conductor that acts as poorly as it does because of impure atoms of some other material that has become part of it. This addition of these impurities is referred to as doping.

Aluminum gallium arsenide is the most common material for LED conduction. If the material is pure no electrons are free to conduct an electric current. With doping, however, there are more atoms that unbalance the combination, making the material a better conductor.

In LED lights the semiconductor that has the abundance of electrons is called material that is N-type because its extra particles carry a negative charge. In this material, the free electrons start in a negative charge and move to an area that is positively charged.

P-type material is An LED light semiconductor that has extra holes, or particles that are charged positively. Electrons are able to jump from one hole to another and thus move from a positive to a negative charge. Because of this, the LED lights' holes look like they have moved from an area positively charged to one that is charged negatively.

A diode, the element that makes up LED lights is composed of one N-type material section that is bonded to one P-type material section. The diode also has electrodes at each of its ends. With this arrangement, the diode can send electricity in just one direction. If there is no voltage applied to this diode the N-type electrodes fill the P-type holes along the junction that lies between the two layers. This forms a depletion zone. In an LED lights depletion zone, the material that makes up the semiconductor goes back to its original state of insulation. This is because the holes have all been filled, so no free electrons or empty spaces are present. LED lights current can't flow at this point.