Displays have exhibited profound evolutions in recent years, with novel product applications, form factors, and underlying technologies being developed each year. Growing display applications and ever-increasing consumer expectations in performance and quality push the limits of design, manufacturing, and reliability engineering. A key factor to keeping pace with these rapid developments is maintaining a robust understanding of how and why particular failure modes occur. These understandings translate into component and process improvements and can be implemented prior to product launch (ideally) or to correct failures occurring in released devices. But with all these new technologies, are modern display failures also wholly unique? In my nearly 15 years of experience, the answer is almost always “no”. When taking a scientific method approach to seemingly novel display failure modes, we have found that traditional branches of study still lend themselves to unlocking deeper insights into the “how” and “why” of failures. Using an example from thin film fracture mechanics, I will showcase Exponent’s approach that reduces a complex problem into its constituent parts, and then applies well-established scientific principles to uncover the root cause. I will show how relatively new techniques (e.g., nanoindentation, nanoscratch testing, and single-cantilever beam testing) enable the translation of modern display failures into tractable physics, chemistry, and materials science problems that are solvable.

Dr. Brown is a Corporate Vice President and Principal Engineer in Exponent’s Materials Science and Electrochemistry Practice. Dr. Brown’s primary area of expertise is failure analysis in support of product development, in particular for displays in the consumer electronics industry. He specializes in complex, multidisciplinary technical problems that span materials, mechanical, chemical, and optical root causes. He has extensive experience diagnosing failures in full consumer electronic systems, display modules, camera modules, PCBs, thin film stacks, housing enclosures, flexible cables, small-scale electronic elements, and a variety of electronics packaging. With well over a decade of experience, Dr. Brown has worked on hundreds of failure modes, such as materials fracture, corrosion of small-scale components, delamination, thin film mechanical failures, nano-/micro- scale fabrication process issues, active display element failures, and manufacturing process quality issues. As part of fracture analysis in brittle materials, such as glass and both single-crystal and polycrystalline ceramics, Dr. Brown routinely performs analyses of stress-at-failure, fracture origin identification, and assessment of the cause of fracture.