A 5" plastic-based AMOLED panel with optimal structure and optical design was fabricated. The panel is designed to coincide the OLED/TFT layer with the neutral plane and limit the largest strain of the outmost part to be less than 1%. Its performance remained prominent after repeated rolled at 3mm radius.
Author KeywordsFlexible; rollable; foldable; AMOLED; plastic; neutal plane; symmetric panel stack
Objective and BackgroundThe advancement of thin, light and flexible displays has been receiving great attention over the past decades. Due to high temperature requirement during the fabrication process, most of flexible panels demonstrated were fabricated on plastic substrates such as polyimide and PEN, etc. In recent years, we have also successfully demonstrated our capability to produce plastic-based EPD and AMOLED displays with fixed curve and down to certain bending conditions [1][2]. In addition to thinner feature compared to EPD, AMOLED's, intrinsic property including self-emission ability and high color production range as well as fast response time allows easy video viewing, providing a very wide range of its application possibilities in the near future. The plastic-based AMOLED panels have been commercialized on smartphones; however, the fixed curve appearance is far from satisfying customers' desire for a truly flexible device. Based on the marketing research, demand of truly flexible panels become desirous with rapid requirement of hand-on electronics like smartphones, tablets and wearable devices…etc.Currently, the commercial fixed-curve smartphones or watches were made of top-emission AMOLED combined with a layer of circular polarizer (CPL). The most common types of CPL is mainly composed of stretched PVA and retardation films with the overall thickness usually larger 140m. Therefore, the mechanical property of a CPL such as minimum bending radius is large and its rolling feasibility is limited. Meanwhile, the light efficiency is reduced to less than 50% and light leaking phenomena is found while panel is bent to curve. Therefore, we propose a new structure-symmetrical panel stack (SPS)-that allows us to produce a much thinner, softer plastic-based AMOLED panel without the employment of CPL in this study.Unlike the previous report which demonstrated multi-foldable display with AMOLED [3], plastic substrates are adopted on both sides in this work. Color Filter (CF) part is fabricated using a transparent plastic substrate and AMOLED part is fabricated on the high-temperature-resistance plastic substrate. The thickness and young's modules of each layer is carefully designed to achieve the most optimized mechanical properties. In addition, optical performance comparable to conventional AMOLED is obtained by employing full color RGB with anti-reflection layer (ARL) designed on the CF side. Because the SPS structure provides optimal mechanical properties, the proposed structure is expected to have little difficulty of achieving large-scale production in the future.
Panel structure design and fabricat...