Advanced R2R Touch Panel Manufacturing Solutions
Thomas Deppisch, Neil Morrison, Christof Kurthen, Uwe Hermanns, Dirk Wagner &
Reiner Kukla
Applied Materials WEB Coating GmbH, Alzenau, Germany
In recent years the growth of the display industry has been significantly enhanced by the
explosive proliferation of touch screen based mobile devices to the consumer electronics
market. The success of these, now almost ubiquitous, Touch Screen Panels, has in part been
enabled by the availability of proven manufacturing solutions such as the SmartWeb
®
platform from Applied Materials, which have been designed to meet the strict optical and
electrical requirements for the touch panel manufacturing industry.
Roll-to-Roll (R2R) production of thin film based Touch Panels combine the advantages of
the use of inexpensive, lightweight & flexible substrates with high throughput production.
Nevertheless, material handling, patterning and yield issues have limited widespread
utilization of R2R manufacturing within the electronics industry. Challenges also exist in
terms of the deposition technologies used in R2R manufacture of these devices. Unlike
traditional semiconductor or display based cluster tool platforms, R2R systems require to
process substrates in a continuous fashion with rolls up to several kilometers in length.
A wide variety of different deposition processes are utilized during the manufacture of film
based touch panel devices. These include the deposition of diffusion barrier films,
passivation films, metal contacts, optical index matching films and transparent conductive
oxides (TCO’s).
This talk therefore describes latest advances in R2R PVD processing for advanced TSP
production, specifically highlighting enhancement in active layer stack electrical, optical and
environmental performance necessary to enable the next generation of film based TSP
devices.
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