Abstract
Recently, manufacturing of flat panel displays has been required to achieve high cost-performance and to concern about environmental issues. For these reasons, application of the lift-off process in place of the etching process to electrode pattern formation in manufacturing of plasma display panels was considered. To resolve problems in conventional lift-off process caused by inappropriate resist profiles, the inversely-tapered resist profile with interstice was proposed, and its fundamental feasibility was experimentally proved. However, even if this resist profile is employed, the problems in the lift-off process still occur when its dimensions are inappropriately given. Therefore, proper design of that resist profile is important. Generally, design of the profile is achieved by iteration of two processes: one is calculation of thickness distribution of the formed electrode pattern, and the other is optimization of dimensions of the profile. It is required that the calculation process is carried out with small computational load and supplies useful information for the optimization process. For this reason, a calculation method which meets the requirements and a design method based on this new method were proposed. However, this calculation method considers only two-dimensional behavior of depositing material in a cross sectional plane. This paper describes enhancement of the calculation method by taking three-dimensional behavior of depositing material into consideration, and reports better consistency between calculation results by the proposed method and experimental results.
