Holst Centre Unveils Roll-to-Roll Imprint Tool for Process Development

Holst Centre has commissioned a tailor-made and highly flexible roll-to-roll ultraviolet imprint tool. The new machine allows the open innovation center to develop and optimize self-aligned roll-to-roll manufacturing processes for a wide range of flexible electronic applications. Researchers have already used the tool to create embedded shunt lines for working OLEDs, showing the feasibility of using both imprint and printing techniques in roll-to-roll production.

Imprinting is a patterning technology with great potential in electronics applications from OLEDs and TFT displays to microfluidic biosensors and RFID tags. As a self-aligned technology, it can pattern complex 3D geometries in a single step, enabling high throughputs and low operating costs.

Holst Centre is investigating how imprint techniques can be integrated into roll-to-roll production processes. For this, it has invested in a unique roll-to-roll UV imprint tool that was designed and built by coating equipment specialists Coatema to Holst Centre’s specifications. The new unit is extremely flexible, allowing processes to be optimized for a wide range of products and applications. It can produce structures from hundreds of nanometers to tens of microns in size. Holst Centre plans to add measurement and deposition equipment in the near future, enabling integrated processes on a single machine.

“Imprint is a relatively simple technology. Using it in a roll-to-roll set-up will allow us to create faster, more stable processes than are possible with sheet-to-sheet manufacturing. With the technical and application know-how available within Holst Centre and our eco-system, we will explore how roll-to-roll imprint processes can meet future technology needs,” says Merijn Wijnen of Holst Centre’s patterning for flexible structures program.

Researchers have already created working light out-coupling structures to improve the efficiency of OLEDs. The team has also used the new tool to embed conductive lines (shunt lines) into a flexible substrate to provide flatter surface for depositing organic polymer layers.

Such embedded shunt lines could simplify OLED