Development of single-chamber deposition equipment for organic/inorganic nanohybrid composite material

A newly designed single-chamber system is equipped with Ni/Cr alloy wires that work as the heating filaments in the initiated chemical vapor deposition (iCVD) and also as the RF plasma generating electrode in atomic layer deposition (ALD) for facilitating the manufacturing of organic/inorganic hybrid thin film encapsulation (TFE). The total processing time was noticeably reduced because the deposition temperature of ALD could be decreased to that of iCVD by adopting the plasma enhanced ALD (PE-ALD) instead of the conventional thermal ALD. The previously reported single-chamber system using iCVD/ALD processes takes long time since the substrate temperatures in the iCVD and ALD processes are different and the heating and cooling steps are inevitable between each process. By applying plasma on the ALD process, in this work, the heating and cooling steps could be excluded because a thin layer was deposited at the same temperature of the substrate in iCVD through generating a reactive radical species during the PE-ALD process. By adopting the PE-ALD process, multi-layered organic/inorganic hybrid TFEs that have a good barrier performance could be deposited on the surface of the substrate in a single chamber efficiently and the total processing time could be effectively reduced.