64‐5: Virtual ESD Failure Detection Methodology for Oxide TFT Based OLED Panels

As the screen size and pixel resolution increase, electrostatic discharging (ESD) problems have become the most detrimental issue for the next‐level OLED devices such as IT‐OLED, and QD‐OLED. Electrostatic discharging (ESD) is a well‐known phenomenon in the semiconductor and display industry. For its catastrophic failure, lots of effort has been made over the last three decades to predict ESD failures systematically in display panels, but proper methodologies for ESD hotspot prediction have not developed due to its complicated physical behaviors. Especially for the oxide TFT‐based OLED devices, the Bottom Metal Layer (BML) is introduced to shield the electric field from the external light‐induced charging and enhance the output characteristics of oxide TFT. However, this large area of the BML layer can cause serious electrostatic charging (ESD) issues during the fabrication process. In this work, we analyzed five different types of temporal charging injection mechanisms and three types of failure phenomena. To simulate the multi‐scale time‐dependent full panel ESD models, we developed simplified OLED panel design verification models by using advanced numerical techniques such as perfect boundary approximation and thin sheet metal approximation. Based on the newly developed simulation methodology, robust OLED panel designs are suggested and experimentally verified..