Enabling High-Throughput, Low-Cost Manufacturing of OLED Display and Lighting Panels

Abstract

AbstractLarge-scale manufacturing of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels for lighting and display has been slowed by several manufacturing factors, prominent among which are low throughput due in part to the fine metal mask technology for patterning the red-, green-, and blue-light-emitting pixels and low materials utilization efficiency of the available vacuum deposition technology. To overcome these impediments to low-cost OLED manufacturing, Kodak developed a blanket white-emitting OLED architecture in combination with a pixilated color filter array to eliminate the need for fine metal masks and developed a vacuum deposition technology capable of high deposition rates and high materials utilization efficiency. These developments, taken together, allow much higher throughput and yield on fifth-generation and larger substrates that promise to enable low-cost manufacturing of OLED displays and lighting panels. This paper focuses on the deposition technology Kodak developed, a flash vaporization process that can deliver very high materials utilization efficiency at high deposition rates for small-molecule OLED materials without increasing material decomposition.