Development of Very High Luminance p-i-n Junction-Based Blue Fluorescent Organic Light-Emitting Diodes

Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) can emit light over much larger areas than their inorganic counterparts, offer mechanical flexibility, and can be readily integrated on various substrates and backplanes. However, the amount of light they emit per unit area is typically lower and the required operating voltage is higher, which can be a limitation for emerging applications of OLEDs, e.g., in outdoor and high-dynamic-range displays, biomedical devices, or visible-light communication. Here, high-luminance, blue-emitting (lambda(peak) = 464 nm), fluorescent p-i-n OLEDs are developed by combining three strategies: First, the thickness of the intrinsic layers in the device is decreased to reduce internal voltage loss. Second, different electron-blocking layer materials are tested to recover efficiency losses resulting from this thickness reduction. Third, the geometry of the anode contact is optimized, which leads to a substantial reduction in the in-plane resistive voltage losses. The OLEDs retain a maximum external quantum efficiency of 4.4% as expected for an optimized fluorescent device and reach a luminance of 132 000 cd m(-2) and an optical power density of 2.4 mW mm(-2) at 5 V, a nearly eightfold improvement compared to the original reference device.