Highly Densified Aluminum-Titanium Oxide (AlTiOx) Films for Low-Temperature Protection Layer Formation

Abstract

To make electrical insulation of flexible electronics and prevent chemical oxidation by water or oxygen, it is necessary to introduce a protection layer such as an insulating layer or a passivation layer. In general, metal oxides are widely used because they can form 3D bond structures compared to polymers. For fabricating highly densified films through a conventional solution process, high-temperature treatment is required. However, since most plastic substrates have a low glass transition temperature and a relatively high coefficient of thermal expansion compared to metal oxides, there are restrictions on processing temperature. Therefore, low-temperature-based processes such as combustion reaction and photo-annealing process are being studied a lot. And the various coating processes such as dip coating, spray coating, and blade coating are being studied for large-area fabrication. But there are few studies on the combination of the bar coating process and deep-ultraviolet (DUV) annealing process. In this research, aluminum-titanium oxide was fabricated using the bar-coating process and the deep-ultraviolet process. By using the bar-coating method and the DUV annealing method together, a highly densified and the high uniform film was fabricated. Also, a multi-advantage metal oxide film was fabricated. This multi-component metal oxide is rarely used in the protection layer, and has several advantages, high insulation performance (< 10-7 A/cm2 at 2 MV/cm) and UV light blocking property (< 300 nm).