Micropatterning of emitting layers by microcontact printing and application to organic light-emitting diodes

The microcontact printing (mu CP) technique. which is a simple and low damage fabrication technique for thin films, was successfully applied to fabricate patterned emitting layers such as polyfluorene (PF). We fabricated micropatterns by transferring dried and uniform thin films, and observed strong electroluminescence (EL) from the fabricated organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) with the patterned emitting layers. The performance of the fabricated device was superior to that of a conventionally fabricated device. This demonstrates the well-controlled interfaces achieved by mu CP. Furthermore, we succeeded in fabricating OLEDs with multiple emitting layers. These results show that this technique is promising for application to cost-effective, high luminance and multicolored OLED displays. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.