Flexible OLED fabrication with ITO thin film on polymer substrate

Abstract

This paper reports the synthesis of flexible indium tin oxide (ITO) films in a dual pulse magnetron sputtering (DPMS) system at low temperature (<100°C) deposition condition. This study also presents experimental demonstration of the ITO films for their possible use in the fabrication of organic light emitting diode (OLED) device, and the device performance on the super polycarbonate substrates. The presented data reveals the feasibility of ITO films, with a very low sheet resistance of >30 Ω/□ and high transmittance of >88% at 550 nm, simply by the magnetron pulse mode operations with increasing pulse frequency from 0 to 50 kHz.

Ultrahigh-performance transparent conductive films of carbon-welded isolated single-wall carbon nanotubes

“… ( A ) Optical image of an 80 mm × 80 mm SWCNT TCF. ( B ) T (for 550-nm light) versus R s of our SWCNT TCFs together with the previously reported results for untreated CNT TCFs in the literature ( 4 , 14 , 15 , 18 , 29 , 30 ) and a superior ITO TCF on a polymer substrate ( 17 ). ( C ) T (for 550-nm light) versus R s of our doped SWCNT TCFs together with the reported results for doped CNT TCFs in the literature ( 2 – 4 , 12 , 14 , 33 ) and the superior ITO TCF ( 17 ).…”

“…T versus R s is plotted in Fig. 3B and tabulated in table S1A, together with the results for previously reported SWCNT TCFs in the literature ( 4 , 14 , 15 , 18 , 29 , 30 ) and that of a superior ITO TCF on a polymer substrate ( 17 ). The average R s of our SWCNT TCFs is 41 ohm □ −1 at 90% T for 550-nm light, about 5.5 times lower than that of the best value previously reported ( 18 ) and very close to that of ITO TCF.…”

“…All these characteristics give the as-prepared TCFs a very low sheet resistance ( R s ) of 41 ohm □ −1 at 90% transmittance ( T ) for 550-nm light, which is about 5.5 times lower than that of the best reported undoped CNT TCF ( 18 ). After HNO 3 doping, the resistance was further decreased to 25 ohm □ −1 , even better than that of ITO supported on a flexible substrate ( 17 ). Studies on isolated SWCNT-based field-effect transistors (FETs) show that the joints between nanotubes convert what would be Schottky contacts between m-SWCNTs and s-SWCNTs into near-ohmic ones and, hence, markedly improve the electrical conductivity of the SWCNT network.…”

“…However, the performance of SWCNT TCFs is still not as good as ITO and falls far short of what might be expected from the electrical and optical properties of individual SWCNTs ( 15 ). For example, the sheet resistances of ITO on rigid and flexible substrates are ~10 ohm □ −1 ( 16 ) and ~30 ohm □ −1 ( 17 ), respectively, at 90% transmittance for 550-nm light, whereas values for pristine SWCNT TCFs (without doping or patterning) are usually above 200 ohm □ −1 ( 18 , 19 ). Junction resistance and bundling are recognized as the two major issues accounting for the poor performance of SWCNT TCFs.…”

P‐167: Low Temperature Curable Hole Injection Polymer for Flexible OLEDs

“…One of the issues of FOLEDs is processing temperature of thin film fabricating. In some cases, FOLEDs is fabricated with polymer substrate [5,6]. Therefore, the maximum processing temperature is limited by thermal stability of polymer substrate.…”