This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to develop a high-rate and large-area manufacturing process for a non-toxic barrier coating that can be used in flexible display and other applications. A flexible single-layer and environmentally-friendly barrier that has both inorganic and organic properties will be used to allow a much thinner barrier to be effective, thus significantly reducing the manufacturing costs.
The broader/commercial impact of this project will be the development of a cost-effective thin film encapsulation technology to enable a wide range of applications such as emerging display, imaging, battery and power generating technologies. These applications require a flexible, low-cost, and mostly transparent, thin permeation barrier to prevent oxygen and moisture from causing degradation. In this project, large-area scalability and ability to encapsulate devices made on flexible substrates will be addressed.
Thin film environmental barriers are required for OLEDs in portable devices, flexible solar cells, wallpaper-type solid state lighting, and transistor backplanes for lightweight electronic books. Currently available thin film barriers are composites that consist of dyads of a thin film of an impermeable inorganic material such as silica (glass), alumina, or silicon nitride, and a thin film of an organic polymer. These barrier films face several challenges. The most critical one is the long total actual cycle time TACT resulting from the need of multiple chambers and transfers in between those during the process, making it not suitable for commercial manufacturing process. This program is aimed to produce a commercially viable thin film encapsulation process, and thereby meet an important economic need. The new barrier film has a high potential for commercial payback in the OLED display and lighting markets in addition to the thin film battery and photovoltaic industries. For this thin film encapsulation process to be commercially viable, it was important for us to develop and demonstrate films that can be deposited in manufacturable TACT. Short TACT time can be obtained by reducing the film thickness and by increasing the deposition rate. In this program, we made tremendous progress and met or exceeded all the objectives on time. We demonstrated the commercial viability of our barrier film by reducing the deposition time on a R&D tool maintaining excellent barrier properties as evident from accelerated shelf-lifetime tests. We scaled the barrier film to large area devices, and demonstrated the mechanical flexibility of our barrier film and its compatibility with flexible OLED devices by achieving excellent shelf-lifetime performance. Technical work under this program has led to UDC improving its barrier performance to meet commercial requirements. This has enabled us to start working with multiple industrial companies to commercialize our technology. Through these efforts, we are more and more confident that this thin film encapsulation technology has great potential to be commercialized in the near future.
