ALD: The essential bodyguard for delicate electronics and displays
Printed circuit boards, scintillators and OLED displays contain highly sensitive electronics and materials. ALD coatings as thin as 20 nm provide the best protection against moisture and vapor.
No bulk, no problem. Exposure to high temperatures, water, solvents, and other corrosive environments can rapidly deteriorate sensitive electronics. Thin films deposited by atomic layer deposition offer a dense, pinhole-free layer of protection against all incidental contact of PCBs, scintillators, and OLED displays with moisture and vapors without the extra bulk of a protective housing or enclosure. The conformality of ALD produces a flush coating to provide complete encapsulation of the underlying electronic components, even on high aspect ratio structures.
More advantages with less material. Popular organic moisture barriers, like parylene, require thick films, suffer from outgassing, and adhere poorly to metals. ALD proves to be the best technology for keeping water and vapors out of places they should not be. Benefits of ALD encapsulation include:
Highly conformal coatings for complete encapsulation
WVTR as low as 1 x 10-5 g/m2day (106 times better than parylene)
Ability to deposit laminate and alloy coatings
Suppression of metallic whiskers
Flexible moisture barriers and low temperature depositions
Robust equipment to enable your technologies. Beneq’s portfolio of equipment is the best-suited for addressing all coating challenges for electronics and displays.Discover how our roll-to-roll Genesis ALD allows you to enjoy best-in-class moisture barriers on your flexible OLED technologies. Or take advantage of increased coating throughput of your PCBs and scintillators with the high-capacity batch processing of the Beneq P400A and Beneq P800.
Atomic layer deposition (ALD) takes moisture protection to a completely new level by providing pin-hole free coating on even the most complex high ratio surfaces.
We did a little research and looked at the list of all customer projects from our Coating Services unit and checked what industrial ALD applications our customers have run on Beneq equipment. These were the 3 most popular industrial ALD applications.
Today we’re talking to Dr Mikko Söderlund, Head of Industrial Solutions at Beneq, to find out more about flexible electronics and how they benefit from ALD coating.
Electronic components and devices do not tolerate hot and humid conditions. Most people know this and avoid exposing electronics to vapors and liquids.
Earlier we shared examples of industrial use of ALD in moisture barriers. Now we continue with another typical area of ALD applications: Optical coatings.
A typical WVTR value of our nCLEAR ALD barrier coatings is 4×10-6 g/m2 per day. That is a million times less moisture through the surface than with the best parylene alternative.