Anti-reflective coating with a conductive indium tin oxide layer on flexible glass substrates

Flexible glass has many applications including photovoltaics, organic light-emitting device (OLED) lighting, and displays. Its ability to be processed in a roll-to-roll facility enables high-throughput continuous manufacturing compared to conventional glass processing. For photovoltaic, OLED lighting, and display applications, transparent conductors are required with minimal optical reflection losses. Here, we demonstrate an anti-reflective coating (ARC) that incorporates a useful transparent conductor that is realizable on flexible substrates. This reduces the average reflectivity to less than 6% over the visible band from normal incidence to incident angles up to 60°. This ARC is designed by the average uniform algorithm method. The coating materials consist of a multilayer stack of an electrically functional conductive indium tin oxide with conductivity 2.95×10⁵  Siemens/m (31 Ω/□), and AlSiO₂. The coatings showed modest changes in reflectivity and no delamination after 10,000 bending cycles. This demonstrates that effective conductive layers can be integrated into ARCs and can be realized on flexible glass substrates with proper design and process control.