Speeding up the unique assets of atomic layer deposition

Abstract

Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) has been traditionally regarded as an extremely powerful but slow thin-film deposition technique. The (perceived) limitation in terms of deposition rate has resulted in a slow penetration of the technology into mass manufacturing beyond established applications in the semiconductor industry until recently. At present, several developments have resulted in a significant increase in the use of ALD in a number of mass manufacturing applications. On the one hand, there is an increasing demand from the device makers side to incorporate nanotechnology in their products that relies on the unique advantages of ALD. On the other hand, a number of technical improvements have been implemented in the ALD method allowing it to be much faster. In this paper, we provide an overview of different High Throughput (HT) ALD approaches, putting them in perspective with other common HT deposition techniques already used in the industry. As an example, the use of HT ALD for Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (OLED) thin-film encapsulation is discussed.

A substrateless, flexible, and water-resistant organic light-emitting diode

“…In the past, ALD has been associated with limited throughput because each deposition cycle only yields a single atomic layer and takes of order 10 s to complete in a lab-scale reactor. However, through reactor optimization, cycle times have been reduced to the subsecond scale, and emerging modalities such as spatial ALD have demonstrated even 100-fold improvements in speed over conventional ALD, thus largely invalidating these concerns 44 . Besides the individual advantages of the ALD nanolaminate and the CVD parylene-C, the combination of both appears to be particularly attractive for a TFE barrier that is to be used in moist environments.…”

Preserving nanoscale features in polymers during laser induced graphene formation using sequential infiltration synthesis

“…ALD, and similar techniques like SIS, have been widely and safely used for decades, both in industry and academic research 34 . Recent work has also highlighted the potential for these approaches to be performed using roll-to-roll atmospheric pressure systems 23,35 . Thus, the combination of SIS and laser pyrolysis is a potentially scalable drop-in technology for converting existing polymer membranes into conductive membranes.…”

Atomic Layer Deposition of Inorganic Thin Films on 3D Polymer Nanonetworks

“…However, the extremely low GPC values of conventional ALD are not suitable for mass-production. In this regard, it is worth attempting to apply the recently proposed spatial ALD (SALD), which allows a much faster deposition rate, to complex nanostructures [101][102][103]. The remaining technical issue is to ensure the deposition of inorganic thin films at low temperatures.…”