Beneq offer Smartphone OLED encapsulation with ultrafast spatial ALD

Here is a follow up on the recent media reports in the induistry that we will soon see ALD encapsulated OLED smartphone screeens by Apple and Samsung.

 (www.beneq.com)

BENEQ: Ultimate OLED encapsulation with ultrafast spatial ALD

When the consumer electronics industry moves towards flexible solutions, encapsulation of flexible OLED displays against moisture permeation is one of the most difficult challenges. Totally conformal and pinhole-free ALD barrier films are ideal for ensuring a long lifetime for flexible OLEDs. They provide better barriers than traditional thick CVD solutions and much thinner coatings than the complex multi-layer PECVD barrier film alternatives.

But the coating quality of ALD thin films has actually never been the point of concern – the high encapsulation performance is widely accepted. The question in the consumer electronics business has been whether ALD can be productive enough. What has now changed?

The advances in low temperature plasma ALD processing and spatial ALD as a means to increase the equipment productivity have transformed ALD-based barrier coatings from a research topic to a viable encapsulation alternative in mass production. The high capacity of the latest spatial ALD solutions has brought the cost of ownership of ALD to acceptable levels also for consumer electronics applications.

 

Please check ot BENEQ Blog for the complete story here:  http://beneq.com/blog/201609/smart-ald-phones.html

High-throughput Large-Area Spatial ALD by Beneq from Finland

Beneq announced their new fast Spatial ALD reactor in November last year (Beneq introduces the next revolution in industrial ALD). End of July Beneq released more information in the ALD2016 Ireland exhibition

Large-area sheet-to-sheet spatial ALD system (From Beneq Blog)

Beneq is a pioneer in ALD solutions that enable coating of large substrates, and we have also discussed them here in the blog. Beneq’s Mikko Söderlund was showcasing our innovations in this area to the ALD2016 audience.

Our large-area spatial ALD coating equipment has been developed for high-throughput coating applications such as Zn buffer for CIGS solar cells, OLED encapsulation, glass coating, and rear-surface passivation of crystalline solar cells. The new spatial ALD process makes it possible to coat bigger substrates faster and in a more flexible way. The capacity of the new large-area ALD coating equipment really opens doors to new possibilities in industrial-level coating. You can check the latest results of our large-sheet ALD tests from Mikko’s poster.

The large area spatial ALD reactor from Beneq (picture from Beneq)

The above deposition speeds result in massive area throughput figures. For rear-surface passivation (with a thin 5 nm Al2O3 coating) as a case example, processing wafers at substrate speeds exceeding 20 m/min would allow a single piece of equipment to produce over 30 000 wafers per hour. That is fast by any standard. (from Beneq Blog)

Download Mikko's ALD2016 poster to get all the details of the latest spatial ALD pilots with large substrates.

I met with Beneq at the ALD2016 Exhibition to discuss the new spatial ALD reactor (Picture Fotografie Katharina Knaut).