Heike Landgraf

46.1: New Concept for Large Area White OLED Production for Lighting

A new concept of a vertical in-line deposition machine for large area white OLED production has been developed. The machine concept and linear evaporation source designed for up to Gen 4 substrates resulted in material utilization of > 50 %. A vacuum handling and alignment system for shadow masks has been developed.

Roll-to-roll manufacturing of electronic devices

Roll-to-Roll (R2R) production of thin film based electronic devices (e.g. solar cells, activematrix TFT backplanes & touch screens) combine the advantages of the use of inexpensive, lightweight & flexible substrates with high throughput production. Significant cost reduction opportunities can also be found in terms of processing tool capital cost, utilized substrate area and process gas flow when compared with batch processing systems. Nevertheless, material handling, device patterning and yield issues have limited widespread utilization of R2R manufacturing within the electronics industry.

New concept for in-line OLED manufacturing

A new concept of a vertical In-Line deposition machine for large area white OLED production has been developed. The concept targets manufacturing on large substrates (≥ Gen 4, 750 x 920 mm2) using linear deposition source achieving a total material utilization of ≥ 50 % and tact time down to 80 seconds. The continuously improved linear evaporation sources for the organic material achieve thickness uniformity on Gen 4 substrate of better than ± 3 % and stable deposition rates down to less than 0.1 nm m/min and up to more than 100 nm m/min. For Lithium-Fluoride but also for other high evaporation temperature materials like Magnesium or Silver a linear source with uniformity better than ± 3 % has been developed. For Aluminum we integrated a vertical oriented point source using wire feed to achieve high (> 150 nm m/min) and stable deposition rates. The machine concept includes a new vertical vacuum handling and alignment system for Gen 4 shadow masks. A complete alignment cycle for the mask can be done in less than one minute achieving alignment accuracy in the range of several 10 μm.