Manufacturing of polymer light-emitting device structures

Abstract

The gravure printing technique is currently under investigation as a possible method for the roll-to-roll production of OLEDs in the 6th framework EU funded project entitled ROLLED - "Roll-to-roll manufacturing technology for flexible OLED devices and arbitrary size and shape displays". The objective in the project is to fabricate an entire OLED structure by using roll-to-roll manufacturing methods and to examine, how the commercial production could be set up and integrated into an existing printing process. In order to attain a roll-to-roll compatibility, all the materials, inks and device structures need to be suitable for printing. Since, such OLED device structures are very sensitive to moisture and oxygen, high barrier materials to be applied as wet chemical coatings on transparent polymer films such as PET by common roll-to-roll coating techniques have been investigated. The barrier films on their respective substrates act as front and back side encapsulation materials, where the front side encapsulation material is to be used as a transparent and flexible substrate for OLED fabrication. The transmission rates to be achieved for both front and back side encapsulation for oxygen and water vapour are 5 mg m^-2day^-1 (corresponding to 7 cm³m^-2day^-1 for O₂). In this paper, we show how light-emitting devices manufactured by gravure printing operate compared to the ones manufactured by traditional methods. Furthermore, we present recent results on the development of ITO nanoparticle coatings, cathode inks and flexible barrier materials.