Abstract
Industrialization of electrofluidic devices requires both high performance coating laminates and efficient material utilization on large area substrates. Here we show that screen printing can be effectively used to provide homogeneous pin-hole free patterned amorphous fluoropolymer dielectric layers to provide both the insulating and fluidic reversibility required for devices. Subsequently, we over-coat photoresist using slit coating on this normally extremely hydrophobic layer. In this way, we are able to pattern the photoresist by conventional lithography to provide the chemical contrast required for liquids dosing by self-assembly and highly-reversible electrofluidic switching. Materials, interfacial chemistry, and processing all contribute to the provision of the required engineered substrate properties. Coating homogeneity as characterized by metrology and device performance data are used to validate the methodology, which is well-suited for transfer to high volume production in existing LCD cell-making facilities.
Highlights
Electrofluidics, known as electrowetting, is a mechanism of changing the wettability of a dielectric solid surface by use of an applied electric field
One of the major challenges is to develop an efficient approach to processing the main functional materials and achieving high quality large area electrofluidic arrays
Some key issues that are important for the commercialization of electrofluidic arrays are simplifying the fabrication process, improving material utilization, and increasing the homogeneity of the coatings over large areas
Summary
Electrofluidics, known as electrowetting, is a mechanism of changing the wettability of a dielectric solid surface by use of an applied electric field. Materials 2016, 9, 707 previous work [19,20], we reported the possibility of using screen printing to simultaneously coat and pattern fluoropolymer (FP) films as insulators for EFD devices on 6 inch square substrates. This reduced the coating time from ~4 min/plate to less than 1 min/plate while increasing the material utilization from 22% to >52%. Display devices are assembled and test data obtained for the purposes of process validation
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