Degradation study of organic semiconductor devices under electrical and optical stresses

Degradation due to electrical and optical stresses on organic semiconductor devices fabricated with imidazolin-5-one as an active layer is studied in this letter. It is found that while both electrical and optical stresses degrade device performance, the former leads to much faster degradation as compared with the latter. It is found that in electrical-stress degradation, the drop in current is a strong function of the charge flowing through the device during stress (charge fluence). For optical-stress degradation, it is strongly dependent on the duration of stress. It is also found that the input electrical and light energy during the stress may be annealing out some of the defects in the device and, hence, mitigating the degradation due to the applied stress.