Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) are receiving the most attention in the display industry due to various advantages such as high color purity due to self-luminous properties and wide viewing angles. Accordingly, the display market is rapidly chan...
Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) are receiving the most attention in the display industry due to various advantages such as high color purity due to self-luminous properties and wide viewing angles. Accordingly, the display market is rapidly changing from liquid crystal displays (LCDs) to OLEDs. The self-luminous property of OLED does not require a color filter, so it has a great advantage in that it has a lightweight and simple structure that can minimize components compared to conventional LCDs. However, OLED is vulnerable to moisture and oxygen, and when exposed to moisture and oxygen, it leads to oxidation and deterioration of organic matter, which can have a fatal effect on the performance of display products. In addition, as the industry develops, the distance between the touch screen panel (TSP) and the OLED panel becomes closer and closer, resulting in signal interference. Such signal generation may lead to device performance deterioration such as touch malfunction and decrease in touch sensitivity. Therefore, it is necessary to prevent moisture, oxygen, and signal interference by introducing an organic/inorganic hybrid material having low dielectric properties into the thin film encapsulation layer. In this paper, polysilsesquioxane (PSSQ), well known as a low dielectric material, was introduced into the thin film encapsulation layer to perform encapsulation of OLED. PSSQ was synthesized as a ladder structure having fluidity through hydrolysis and polycondensation reactions. This material has a copolymeric composition of Alkyl functional groups (Ethyl, Hexyl, Decyl, Dodecyl) and UV curable methacryloyloxypropyl groups. Methacrtylate functional group is exposed to UV to form a cross-linked structure to form a dense structure of a thin film. In general, an encapsulation material is introduced into the encapsulation layer using a high-temperature, high-pressure deposition process. This high-temperature, high-pressure deposition process causes damage to organic materials. However, since the PSSQ of this paper has solvent-free processability, thin films can be easily manufactured without using high-temperature, high-pressure deposition processes or organic solvents. The synthesized PSSQ has a hydroxyl group (O-H) at the end. In order to increase the resistance to moisture, the hydrophobicity was increased by performing an end-capping process in which the terminal O-H group was capped with Si-(CH3)3. In all PSSQs, the contact angle increased by 7-10˚ after endcapping. Ladder-like End-capped Decyl PSSQ (LEDPSSQ) and Ladder-like End-capped Dodecyl PSSQ (LEDOPSSQ) showed high hydrophobicity at 94.3˚ and 94,9˚. Next, in optical transmittance, all PSSQs showed a high transmittance of over 90%. After end-capping, the transmittance decreased as the end was changed, but all end-capped PSSQs showed a high transmittance of about 90%. In dielectric constant evaluation using MIM (metal-insulator-metal) structure, the dielectric constant of Ladder-like End-capped Ethyl PSSQ (LEEPSSQ) was 2.414, Ladder-like End-capped Hexyl PSSQ (LEHPSSQ) was 2.235, LEDPSSQ was 2.179, Finally, the dielectric constant of LEDOPSSQ is 2.409. Lastly, Lifetime was measured to evaluate the encapsulation performance of PSSQ. As a result of the measurement, 2 minutes in LEEPSSQ, 2.3 minutes in LEHPSSQ, 16 minutes in LEDPSSQ, and 1.2 minutes in LEDOPSSQ showed the best performance in LEDPSSQ, showing 8000% performance improvement compared to non-encapsulation OLED. This is because it exhibits high hydrophobicity due to an appropriate cross-linking structure and an increase in alkyl chains. As described above, by introducing PSSQ into the encapsulation layer of the organic light emitting device, low dielectric properties, light transmittance, and device lifetime were greatly improved. PSSQ used in this paper is a low-k optical coating material and has high value in various coating industries.