Not Available

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project involves a novel technique to fabricate full-color organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays in a cost-effective manner. The proposed scanning localized evaporation methodology (SLEM) circumvents the need for using elaborate substrate patterning and large vacuum chambers (to attain film uniformity), currently employed to manufacture OLED flat-panel displays (FPDs). The benefits of SLEM over current fabrication methodologies stem from its parallel processing of various layers, as opposed to sequential techniques. Dedicating a SLEM head to a particular material, multiple evaporating heads are integrated into a unit that yields full-color OLED displays in a single pass. Current projections indicate that using this technique, deposition time for growing all layers for a 3"x4" OLED display (consisting of an array of 270 360 pixels) is estimated to be in the range of 3 to 7 minutes. Considering the wastage in material supplies and equipment infrastructure needed for conventional OLED processing, dedicated SLEM units would provide significant cost advantages in manufacturing OLED displays for various applications. SLEM represents a natural evolution of thermal evaporation that incorporates many features of ink-jet printing. This will naturally allow the production of inexpensive, larger and flexible OLED displays to claim a significant share of the FPD market.