Vapor-phase synthesis of functional soft thin polymer film for the application to next generation display

Abstract

With growing new technologies for display, various types of next generation displays, flexible, wearable, foldable, and stretchable displays, have emerged using integration of these technologies. For next generation display, all single layers need to be flexible. Additionally, each individual layer must be eliminated from delamination and creasing of the stacked layers. And the total number of layers and the total thickness must be decreased to reduce the stress which applies to the layers. Lastly, substrate which can experience the most stress can bear the various stresses for many times. So, new functional soft materials applicable to the next generation display are needed. To achieve the functional soft materials with thin thickness, the novel process for deposit the thin polymer film are needed. The iCVD is one such vapor-phase process which resembles typical solution-phase free radical polymerization. The surface-growing characteristics of the iCVD process possible to control the thickness with nano-scale. Moreover, the vapor phase deposition method warrants the homogeneous mixing of the monomers with particular functionalities in the vapor phase regardless of the miscibility in the liquid phase. In this thesis, I developed the functional thin soft film with various characteristics which is expected that the function thin soft film can be applied in next generation displays without any additives and solvents. In this research, A novel, ultrathin but instantly curable dry adhesive was devised to achieve reliable adhesion between two arbitrary kinds of substrates while maintaining the mechanical flexibility of bonded substrates for next generation displays. And we suggest a novel “sticky” nano-adhesive with excellent flexibility using thermally curable ionic copolymer generated from two acrylate monomers with tertiary amine and alkyl halide functionalities. Lastly, A new design of self-healing soft thin film was devised by introducing a plenty of H-bonding sites in molecular proximity of p(GMA-co-HEA) copolymer films with various mechanical properties and high stretchability, and stress and fast healing ability. These outstanding characteristics of our functional soft thin film will can be good candidates for application to wearable, flexible and stretchable devices.