SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project addresses the development of a novel flexible thin film encapsulation technology to exceed commercial barrier and cost requirements for both existing and emerging commercial products. This research if successfully commercialized will enable a sizeable market for large area, flexible electronic products for displays, solid state lighting, photovoltaics, thin film batteries, image sensors, and medical and security devices. Without the required, and currently unavailable at low enough cost, thin film permeation barrier to prevent the degradation of organic devices, these markets will not be realized.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to develop a high-rate and large-area manufacturing process for a non-toxic barrier coating that can be used in flexible display and other applications. A flexible single-layer and environmentally-friendly barrier that has both inorganic and organic properties will be used to allow a much thinner barrier to be effective, thus significantly reducing the manufacturing costs. The broader/commercial impact of this project will be the development of a cost-effective thin film encapsulation technology to enable a wide range of applications such as emerging display, imaging, battery and power generating technologies. These applications require a flexible, low-cost, and mostly transparent, thin permeation barrier to prevent oxygen and moisture from causing degradation. In this project, large-area scalability and ability to encapsulate devices made on flexible substrates will be addressed