INVITED: Optimized Roll-to-Roll Coating System of Flexible Glass for Applications in the Field of Flexible Electronics and Others

Ultrathin flexible glass, one of the most exciting substrate innovations in the past years, has attracted considerable interest in various fields of application, such as flexible electronics, flexible OLED, and flexible photo-voltaics. Remarkable application demonstrators have been fabricated in R&D environments, raising the question of how to migrate from the R&D ecosystem to a volume production scenario for flexible glass based devices, including roll-to-roll manufacturing.

These considerations initiated the development of a specific R2R PVD coater, the FOSA labX 330 Glass, designed and optimized for handling flexible glass, with modular winding system and process stations, to prove the feasibility of R2R processing of flexible glass substrate for a variety of applications. 

The talk will summarize 8 months of R2R experimental work with flexible glass at this coater. Results of process and layer stack developments for flexible display, flexible OLED, and CSP will be discussed, based on state-of-the-art sputter processes for metals, TCOs, and oxides, combined with substrate heating up to 350°C.

Considering the availability of both high-quality and reliable flexible glass substrates, and the corresponding optimized processing equipment, low cost and high volume manufacturing of flexible glass based devices with unique properties for addressing future markets, seems one step away.