Abstract
Dielectric failure as well as optical switching failure in electrofluidic display (EFD) are still a bottleneck for sufficient device lifetime. In this study, a dielectric redundancy-designed multilayer insulator of ParyleneC/AF1600X was applied in an EFD device. The reliability performance was systematically studied by tracking the applied voltage-dependent leakage current and capacitance changes (I–V and C–V curves) with thermal ageing time. The multilayer insulator shows a more stable performance in leakage current compared to a single-layer insulator. The failure modes during operation underlying the single-layer and the multilayer dielectric appear to be different as exemplified by microscopic images. The single-layer AFX shows significant detachment. In addition, by quantitatively analysing the C–V curves with ageing time, we find that for the single AFX device, the dominant failure mode is ‘no-opening’ of the pixels. For the multilayer device, the dominant failure mode is ‘no-closing’ of the pixels. This study provides tools for distinguishing the basic failure modes of an EFD device and demonstrates a quantitative method for evaluating the reliability performance of the device under thermal ageing.
Highlights
Electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) provides a way for reversible manipulation of surface wettability by externally applied voltage,& 2018 The Authors
It is clear that the driving voltage (30 V) of electrofluidic display (EFD) is still far away from the EW saturation voltage of each dielectric configuration, which means that the EFD devices were all working in the linear Young – Lippmann region [30]
The current response of the single AFX device sharply increased with ageing time
Summary
Electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) provides a way for reversible manipulation of surface wettability by externally applied voltage,. Various failure modes, which cause device degradation that could be categorized into dielectric failure [11] and switching failure [12], have been reported and investigated The physics behind these failure modes, like charge trapping [13,14] and leakage current [15,16], has been well discussed in many reviews [11,17]. We proposed a detailed dielectric safe designed mutilayer insulator (P/AF) based on a simple bilayer model for a planar dielectric in series This bilayer dielectric will be compared with a single layer (AFX) to explore the specific advantages and disadvantages of the multilayer approach. Particular attention will be paid to different failure modes related to dielectric failure and switching failure To this end, accelerated thermal ageing was carried out on the devices by monitoring the leakage current and capacitance. Based on the obtained results, we propose an explanation for the variation of leakage current with ageing time
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