Room-temperature bonding method for polymer substrate of flexible electronics by surface activation using nano-adhesion layers

A sealing method for polymer substrates to be used in flexible electronics is studied. For this application, a low-temperature sealing method that achieves flexible bonding of inorganic bonding material is required, but no conventional technique satisfies these requirements simultaneously. In this study, a new polymer bonding method using thin Si and Fe layers and the surface activated bonding (SAB) method are applied to bond poly(ethylene naphthalate) (PEN) films to each other. PEN films can be bonded via the proposed method without voids at room temperature, and the bonded samples are bendable. The adhesion strength of the bonded samples is so strong that fracture occurs in the polymer bulk rather than at the bond interface. Investigations of the bonded samples by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) reveal that bonding is achieved by chemical interactions between the polymer surface and deposited atoms.