SBIR Phase I: Novel Encapsulation Process for Organic Light Emitting Diodes

这个小企业创新研究第一阶段项目提出了一种封装有机发光二极管（oled）的新方法。与无机材料相比，oled具有成本低、面积大、占地面积小、使用灵活、低温加工等优点。然而，目前，由于环境中的氧气和水分的攻击，oled存在长期稳定性问题。本提案的目的是利用先进的薄膜沉积工艺来封装OLED。该工艺将允许低温沉积高透明，保形和无针孔的非晶态氧化物屏障膜，以显着降低氧气和水分渗透率，延长OLED的使用寿命。这项工作将为生产规模的OLED沉积模块提供先进和优化的OLED封装工艺和工具。OLED的快速发展使得在不久的将来，从大尺寸平板显示器、柔性显示器甚至固态照明的大规模商业应用成为可能。目前，人们对有机电子产品的兴趣是由于需要低成本、大批量的无机器件替代品。除了OLED，由于其低成本和有利的机械性能，有机电子学将广泛应用于低端数据存储电子标签和标签（如条形码），智能卡，柔性电池，光伏，成像，通用照明和电信组件的柔性，轻质和分布式电子和光电子器件。

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes a novel method to encapsulate organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). Compared with the inorganic counterparts, OLEDs have the advantages of low-cost, large-area, small footprint, flexible usage, and low-temperature processing. However, currently, OLEDs suffers long-term stability problem due to attacks of environmental oxygen and moisture. The objective of this proposal is to utilize an advanced thin film deposition process to encapsulate OLED. This process will allow for low temperature deposition of highly transparent, conformal and pinhole-free amorphous oxide barrier films to significantly reduce oxygen and moisture permeation rate and prolong the lifetime of the OLED. This work will lead to an advanced and optimized OLED encapsulation process and tools for aproduction-scale OLED deposition module.Rapid progress on the development of OLED makes it possible to envision large-scale commercial applications in the near future ranging from large-size flat-screen display, flexible display, and even solid-state lighting. Currently, the interest in organic electronics has been fueled by the need for low cost, high volume alternatives to inorganic devices. Besides OLED, thanks to their low cost and advantageous mechanical properties, organic electronics will find wide applications as flexible, lightweight and distributed electronic and optoelectronic devices for low-end data storage electronic tags and labels (e.g., barcodes), smart cards, flexible battery, photovoltaics, imaging, general purpose lighting, and telecommunication components.