Project Description

State of the Art - Background

Organic and Large Area Electronics (OLAE) is a rapidly emerging sector bringing disruptive technological revolutions for industrial applications in Energy, Electronics, Transport, Photonics, Buildings, Lighting & Displays, Health, Wearables, IoT, Agriculture, etc. The OLAE devices are complex architectures (~100-200μm thick) consisting of multilayer stacks of organic, polymer, inorganic and hybrid nanomaterials, manufactured on flexible polymer web rolls of 50-125μm thickness and >100m length, by low-cost, large-scale solution-based Roll-to-Roll (r2r), sheet-to-sheet (s2s) printing and low-pressure gas transport processes. The OE market is estimated to rapidly grow worldwide up to 77.3 B$ in 2029 driven by Organic Photovoltaics (OPVs), Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs), biosensors, flexible batteries IDTechEx, 2019-2029.

However, in order for the EU Industry to unleash the full potential and advantages of OLAE devices (lightweight, flexible, compatible with cost-effective fabrication, environmentally-friendly, tunable transparency, etc) it is necessary to have the capability to make expedious and accurate business decisions to achieve high efficiency, performance and manufacturability of complex OLAE materials and device architectures by solution-based (printing) and gas transport processes, as well as to reduce errors/defects and to eliminate material, process and performance variability.

Modelling and simulation will facilitate and accelerate the growth of the OLAE industry, at a level commensurate with inorganic (opto)electronics, connecting the processing conditions, material properties and device performance. This is an ambitious task, since the organic materials are usually blended and processed in an amorphous state. Charge transport becomes stochastic and highly dependent on the chemical structure and the processing conditions. The sheer number of new candidate materials being discovered every year and the multitude of processing condition variations, make the problem even more complex. Therefore, the modelling of OLAE materials and processes becomes highly demanding whereas it needs significant effort for (per case) validation. This denies the luxury of global well-defined material and process modelling found in crystalline inorganic (opto)electronics.

Nevertheless, this great challenge is also a great opportunity. OLAE does not have the restrictions of its inorganic counterpart: candidate materials are unlimited; process changes are not prohibitively expensive; less cross-contamination issues when changing materials; little compatibility issues, no prior-investment issues. Multi-scale modelling can truly guide through this largely unexplored terrain and become a decisive tool to propel OLAE industry’s design capacity and productivity to world leading applications and products.

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Description of Work

Musicode envisions a unique open innovation platform for materials modelling:

Multiscale modelling of materials, processes, and devices relevant to organic electronics:

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Objectives

This is the vision and target of MUSICODE: to provide to the EU OLAE Industry an Open Innovation Platform for Materials Modelling (OIPMM) (Fig. 1) to unleash the potential of OLAE, with the following Objectives:

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Expected Impact

Modelling and simulation are becoming increasingly accepted as an integral part of industry’s R&D process for designing, pre-screening, validating and optimizing its products. It enables users to virtually design & optimize new products, test manufacturing & design scenarios, and efficiently solve problems before going to the actual manufacturing process. The project innovations will be applicable for a wide range of nanomaterials (organic, polymer, inorganic, hybrid, small molecule, blends, nanoparticles), whereas they can be applied for any kind of materials and devices fabricated by large scale industrial processes. Moreover, the advancements in modelling of the processing-structure-property relationships can be transferred for implementation to other processes (e.g., vacuum as Physical Vapour Deposition, Nanoimprint Lithography, Atomic Layer Deposition, etc). In terms of cost analysis, the optimization of the global process time (including the maintenance), combined with the reduction of production waste will lead to lower the cost of the entire manufacturing system. Therefore, it is evident that MUSICODE will strongly contribute to a significant increase in industrial competitiveness of the EU characterization tools and manufacturing industry, and in the nanofabrication industry of advanced materials and products for mass-market applications in the fields of OEs, Thin Films (e.g. functional films, antimicrobial coatings, barrier films), Electronics, Wearables, Energy, Automotive, Transport, Space, Health, IoT, etc.

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Methodology

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