666 JOURNAL OF DISPLAY TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 11, NO.

8, AUGUST 2015

LTPS TFT Process on Polyimide Substrate for

Flexible AMOLED
Xiaoyu Gao, Li Lin, Yucheng Liu, and Xiuqi Huang

AbstractFor conventional active-matrix organic light-emitting

diode (AMOLED) at panel displays, low temperature poly-silicon
thin-lm transistor (LTPS TFT) on rigid glass substrate process
has already been well established. However, this technology
cannot be applied directly on polyimide (PI) substrate for exible
display. This is because PI has the different coefcient of thermal
expansion (CTE) from the glass, which will result in PI lm
peeling-off and/or warpage issues under conventional LTPS-TFT
process technology. In this paper, a process ow of LTPS TFT
on PI substrate for exible display application was discussed. A
exible display demo system was successfully made by optimizing
the LTPS TFT process.
Index TermsActive-matrix organic light-emitting diode
(AMOLED), exible display, polyamide.
Fig. 1. Brief process ow of the exible AMOLED display.

I. INTRODUCTION

O RGANIC light-emitting diode (OLED) is well known

as one of the most prevailing display technologies to
be applied on exible display. As the OLED-driven device,
thin-lm transistor (TFT) plays a key role in AMOLED exible
displays [1], [2]. There are several options for TFTs, including
a-Si TFT [3], low temperature polysilicon TFT (LTPS TFT),
organic TFT (OTFT), and oxide semiconductor TFT (OSC
TFT). Among these, LTPS TFT has a great advantage over
others to be applied into current-driven OLED device for its
high mobility, threshold voltage stability and capability of
CMOS devices [4], [5]. Especially in mobile display reign,
high resolution, high PPI backplane cannot be achieved by
other technologies, and exible market is most likely to emerge
as mobile displays, such as smart watch with curved display,
foldable smart phone and rollable smart PC, etc. Recently, mass Fig. 2. Sectional views of: (a) PI formation; (b) TFT&OLED fabrication; and
production of curved AMOLED displays based on polymer (c) Laser release process.
substrate was achieved although the yield is much lower than
that on rigid glass substrate.
mation, barrier layers, and thermal shock in LTPS TFT process
In this paper, a process ow using LTPS TFT with PI as sub-
were discussed.
strate was presented. And several common issues such as PI for-
II. EXPERIMENTS
Manuscript received December 03, 2014; revised February 14, 2015;
Fig. 1 shows the process ow of the AMOLED device on
accepted March 24, 2015. Date of publication April 16, 2015; date of cur-
rent version August 04, 2015. This work was supported by the Science and exible substrate. Firstly, a rigid glass was chosen as the device
Technology Public Service and Business of Jiangsu, China, under Project holder with all other devices later put on it. After the standard
.BM2013601 and under 973 project 2015CB655005.
glass RCA clean, a polyimide (PI) lm was coated and cured on
The authors are with the Kunshan New Flat Panel Display Technology
Center Company, Ltd., Jiangsu Province, China, and also with the Visionox the glass holder [6]. TFT backplane was directly fabricated on
R&D Center, Kunshan, 215300, China (e-mail: gaoxy@visionox.com; top of the PI substrate, followed by OLED device and thin lm
linli@visionox.com; liuyc@visionox.com; xqhuang@visionox.com).
encapsulation (TFE) layer deposition in sequence. PI substrate,
Color versions of one or more of the gures are available online at http://
ieeexplore.ieee.org. TFT backplane, OLED device and TFE layers make up the core
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/JDT.2015.2419656 devices of AMOLED. By using excimer laser, PI molecule at

1551-319X 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
GAO et al.: LTPS TFT PROCESS ON POLYIMIDE SUBSTRATE FOR FLEXIBLE AMOLED
TABLE I
PROPERTIES OF POLYMER MATERIALS FOR FLEXIBLE SUBSTRATES
E:EXCELLENT, G:GOOD, F:FAIR, P:POOR
Fig. 3. Bake time and temperature for PI layer curing.
the PI/glass interface was decomposed and core devices could
be easily separated from the glass holder as a result. Fig. 2 shows
the sketch sectional view of PI layer formation, TFT & OLED
fabrication and laser release process.
A. PI Substrate
Flexible display substrate has several additional constraints
such as process temperature limitation, dimensional and thermal
stress issues. There are several polymer candidates for exible
substrate. Table I shows the properties of some of the common
potential polymer materials for exible substrates [7]. Generally
conventional LTPS process temperature is 450 C, indicating
the exible substrate has to withstand at least 450 C. PI is a
very promising material for its high thermal stability, good me-
chanical and chemical properties.
A 10 micron PI lm was coated by slot die process, followed
by bake process. Fig. 3 shows the bake time and temperature for
the PI layer curing. The bake temperature ranges from 20 C to
450 C with total process time 285 minutes. Finally, the PI lm
uniformity is 3%.
B. Barrier Layers
To protect OLED device from water and oxygen penetra-
tion, the substrate must have very excellent material proper-
ties such as water vapor transmission rate (WVTR) less than
10 g/m day and oxygen transmission rate (OTR) less than
day. However, the typical WVTR value for PI
substrate is about 10 g/m day, which is much lower than the
required above. Therefore, a barrier layer between the PI and
TFT devices is needed to enhance the waterproof. Given that
pinholes and/or lm crack in single layer will form during the
fabrication process [8], multi-layers are needed to overlap the
667
Fig. 4. Barriers on PI substrate.
Fig. 5. Barrier layer lm crack on PI substrate.
Fig. 6. Process temperature during the experiment.
pinholes and cracks on each single layer, lengthening the water
and oxygen penetration path and improving the impermeability
as a result.
Fig. 4 shows SiO and SiN were deposited alternately in
sequence on the PI substrate by PECVD, serving as a barrier
layer with total thickness about um. After barrier layer deposi-
tion, the LTPS was formed by a 50 nm amorphous Si deposition
followed by a 450 C dehydrogenation oven annealing process.
Since SiN lm has larger stress than SiO lm, thickness ratio
of SiO and SiN has to be optimized to lower the stress un-
balance. During the dehydrogenation process, this unbalanced
stress between SiO and SiN can be further enhanced due to
the rapid temperature ramp up rate, which will cause the barrier
layer lm crack shown in Fig. 5. In this experiment, thickness
ratio 3:1 for SiO SiN is chosen.
C. Thermal Shock in LTPS-TFT Process
Conventional LTPS process has a typical process temperature
within the range of 450 C using a polysilicon lm produced
by excimer laser annealing (ELA) on the a-Si lm. As shown
in Fig. 6, dehydrogenation by rapid thermal annealing (RTA)
and thermal activation by oven annealing were performed up
to 600 C and 450 C, respectively. So the TFT processes on
668
Fig. 7. TFT curve on exible and glass substrates with
and cm V s.
V.
Fig. 8. Panel drive circuit schematics for exible display.
rigid glass substrate (with a 600 C process temperature capa-
bility) cannot readily be applied on the exible plastic substrates
due to the reason such as lower process temperature constraints,
thermal stress issues resulting in the CTE mismatch, and dimen-
sional stability issues [9].
III. RESULT & DISCUSSION
Fig. 7 shows the device performance comparison between the
conventional glass panel and the exible panel. The threshold
voltage shift is 1.3 volts and mobility is 70 cm V s, sug-
gesting the stable device performance. The good uniformity of
the device performance within the exible panel can drive ex-
ible display well.
Fig. 8 shows the circuit schematics of the panel, which con-
sists of the Gate-driver On Array (GOA) on both sides, ac-
tive pixel arrays in center, and data driver on the bottom. The
GOA was used to control pixel in active area and it may need
three control signals to drive pixel circuit in AMOLED for its
compensation operation. In addition to controlling pixel circuit,
Shift Register (SR) delivers timing signals row by row. Three
signals for the proposed circuit, S1, S2 and EN, were gener-
ated by the SR circuit in each row and the transferred is
JOURNAL OF DISPLAY TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 11, NO. 8, AUGUST 2015
Fig. 9. Measured signals of GOA of the panel.
Fig. 10. 4.6-inch WVGA AMOLED.
TABLE II
SPECIFICATIONS OF A 4.6 INCH PANEL
received by S2 in each row in correspondence with its work du-
ration. The fabrication of both GOA and pixels was based on
LTPS technology and fabricated on exible substrate. Fig. 9 ex-
hibits the measured signals of GOA of the panel. Pixel circuit
on the panel is driven by the said waveforms.
This examination was executed based on 4.6-inch WVGA
AMOLED display as shown in Fig. 10. Table II shows the spec-
ications of the panel. Although there were small deviations
among panels, we could conrm the aforementioned merits of
the proposed exible panel techniques without side effect to dis-
play compared with conventional rigid substrate panel.
IV. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Flexible LTPS-TFT driven AMOLED displays fabricated
on PI substrate were demonstrated which shows a promising
method for providing a viable path for fabricating exible
displays.
GAO et al.: LTPS TFT PROCESS ON POLYIMIDE SUBSTRATE FOR FLEXIBLE AMOLED 669

Development of science and technology has a requirement Xiaoyu Gao received the Ph.D. degree in electronic
for manufacturing exible displays, particularly exible AM science and technology from Shanghai Jiao Tong
University, Shanghai, China. His current interests
OLED display, which is a tough technical challenge. While sig- include backplane and display technology.
nicant progress has been made, many technical issues still re-
main to be resolved such as thermo-mechanical stresses and
self-heating effects.
In the future, direct fabrication of TFT backplanes on exible
polymer substrates by roll to roll (R2R) process will be practical
with larger-size, lower-cost and more exible, particularly using
organic TFTs.
Li Lin received the M.S. degree from Nanjing Uni-
versity, Jiangsu, China. His current interests include
R&D of exible display.

REFERENCES

[1] H.-K Chung, H.-D Kim, and B. Bristal, AMOLED technology for
mobile displays, in 2006 SID Intl. Sym. Dig. Tech. Papers, 2006, vol.
2, pp. 14471450.
[2] T. Ishibashi, J. Yamada, T. Hirano, Y. Iwase, Y. Sato, R. Nakagawa, M.
Sekiya, T. Sasaoka, and T. Urabe, Active matrix organic light emitting
diode display based on super top emission technology, Jpn. J. Appl.
Phys., vol. 45, pp. 43924395, 2006.
[3] A. Nathan et al., Amorphous silicon back-plane electronics for OLED Yucheng Liu received the M.S. degree from North-
displays, IEEE J. Sel. Topics in Quantum Electron., vol. 10, no. 1, pp. western Polytechnical University. His current inter-
5869, Jan./Feb. 2004. ests include R&D backplane technology.
[4] H. J. In, K. H. Oh, I. Lee, D. H. Ryu, S. M. Choi, K. N. Kim, H. D. Kim,
and O. K. Kwon, An advanced external compensation system for ac-
tive matrix organic light-emitting diode displays with poly-Si thin-lm
transistor backplane, IEEE Trans. Electron Devices, vol. 57, no. 11,
pp. 30123019, Nov. 2010.
[5] C. Lin, W. Chang, C. Hung, and C. Tu, LTPS-TFT pixel circuit to
compensate for OLED luminance degradation in three-dimensional
AMOLED display, IEEE Electron Device Lett., vol. 33, no. 5, pp.
700702, May 2012.
[6] A. Pecora et al., Low-temperature polysilicon thin lm transistors on
polyimide substrates for electronics on plastic, Solid State Electron.,
vol. 52, pp. 348352, Nov. 2008. Xiuqi Huang received the Ph.D. degree in material
[7] M. Choi, Y. Kim, and C. Ha, Polymers for exible displays: from physics and chemistry from Institute of Semiconduc-
material selection to device applications, Progr. in Polymer Sci., vol. tors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. His cur-
33, pp. 581630, Dec. 2008. rent interests include R&D of display technology.
[8] M. Miyasaka, H. Hara, N. Karaki, S. Inoue, K. Kawai, and S. Nebashi,
Technical obstacles to thin lm transistor circuits on plastic, Jpn.
JAP, vol. 47, no. 6, p. 4430, Jun. 2008.
[9] G. Fortunato et al., Templier self-heating effects in p-channel polysil-
icon TFTs fabricated on different substrates, J Kor. Phys. Soc., vol.
54, no. 1, p. 455, Jan. 2009.