Lotus to install pilot line for organic electronics barrier layers

Sara Ver-Bruggen - 06 Feb 2012

Lotus Applied Technology will install a pilot a roll-to-roll atomic layer deposition (ALD) tool in Q2 2012.

The pilot line's development is part of ongoing work by the Hillsboro, Oregon, US-headquartered company - a spin-off from Planar Systems - to commercialise a coating process for applications such as low-cost barrier films for organic electronics and photovoltaics.

The pilot line will handle web widths of 300mm and rolls of substrate up to 1,500m. Once the line is running later in 2012, samples of barrier film will be provided to potential clients. From 2014 onwards the process should be ready to commercialise, once the company succeeds in scaling it up to industrial equipment.

The plan is to ultimately licence the process, and Lotus is forming partnerships with tool suppliers with the equipment and know-how. Potential licensees are companies that want to supply the organic and flexible electronics industry with cost-effective barrier films, and other components.

Cost reduction

The roll-to-roll ALD process has the potential to reduce industrial production of barrier films for organic electronics to as little as $1/m² of coated substrate. The company has coated different plastic substrates such as PET and PEN, and even low-cost BOPP film.

When it was spun out from Planar in 2007, Lotus inherited intellectual property in the field of ALD processing and has been developing the roll-to-roll process since 2008. Employee-owned Lotus makes its revenues by carrying out contract research, while it focuses on long-term projects such as its ALD process.

Roll-to-roll ALD processing enables cost-effective barrier film production. The technique creates an effective barrier in one layer, as opposed to typical physical vapour deposition coating stacks of organic and inorganic layers, which are used to create a tortuous path for oxygen and moisture ingress.

Lotus's roll-to-roll ALD process increases throughput by passing the substrate back and forth between separate precursor zones, eliminating the time required for pulsing and purging precursors from a shared volume.

In addition to processing speed, other advantages include confining coating to the surface of the web itself, as it is the only surface that is exposed to both precursors. All surfaces within the machine itself remain clean and coating-free. The technique uses relatively inexpensive precursors, such as the same materials used in pigment production.

Other companies from the ALD equipment industry developing throughput tools based on the process include Beneq in Finland and Cambridge Nanotech in the US.

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