dc.description.abstract | The recent rise of flexible electronics industry aiming to deliver lightweight, flexible, portable and large-area products has been extensively applied in the fields of display, lighting and biomedical engineering and will be the next-generation lifestyle-changing electronic devices. However, many material and process-related challenges appear when flexible organic components are fabricated on polymer substrate. Among the challenges, moisture permeation could degrade and reduce the performance and durability of organic flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED), making it difficult to be developed. In order to achieve OELD’s lifetime of thousands of hours, water vapor transmittance rate (WVTR) must be below <10^-6 g/m^2/day. In this study, magnetron sputtering and hexamethyldisiloxane (HMDSO) were used to deposit SiO2:C barrier film on PET substrate. In high-density plasma produced by magnetron sputtering gun, oxygen, silicon atoms and fragmented HMDSO were mixed together under 2*10^-3 torr to deposit dense films. During PECVD process, there were more cage silicon-oxide structures than linear silicon-oxide structures. By contraries, in our system, most escaping silicon atoms from target connected with carbon atoms instead of oxygen atoms, resulting in a polymer-like film with large amount of linear structure. 100 W RF power, 10sccm O2, 30sccm Ar and 4 sccm HMDSO were applied to deposit a 50-nm-thick film with low porosity and high transmittance above 90%. WVTR of the film reached the value of 7.6*10^-2 g/m^2/day, which is 4 times lower than the best WVTR value, 0.3 g/m^2/day, of films deposited by PECVD-HMDSO system. It is believed that by combining organic and inorganic process, multilayer could meet OLED barrier requirement and will be used in OLED encapsulation industry in future. | en_US |