Backside bonding for extremely narrow bezel at the bottom of flexible displays

Abstract

We developed a novel method to minimize the bezel of flexible displays through backside bonding of a chip on film, resulting in the bezel width of less than 500 μm as compared to 1000 μm of conventional displays. The metal embedded in polyimide (MEP) layer is placed between the first and second polyimide (PI) substrates and connected to the metal lines of the backplane via the MEP contact (M-CNT) hole. Subsequently, the nonconductive film (NCF) bonding and intense pulsed light sintering are performed using conductive ink. Conductive ink as the interconnect material capable of low-temperature sintering is applied to avert thermal degradation and crack. At a high temperature (65°C) and humidity (90% relative humidity), the contact resistance was a drivable level for the display after 240 h. The normalized strain in the M-CNT hole and MEP area were less than 0.4, indicating the absence of cracks during the NCF bonding. These results demonstrated that the backside bonding method was suitable for extremely narrow bezels of the next-generation flexible displays.