Electron transport, device structures

A polymer layer al a contact can enhance current How by serving as a transport layer. The transport layer could have an increased carrier mobility or a reduced Schottky barrier. For example, consider an electron-only device made from the two-polymer-layer structure in the top panel of Figure 11-13 but using an electron contact on the left with a 0.5 eV injection barrier and a hole contact on the right with a 1.2 cV injection barrier. For this case the electron current is contact limited and thermionic emission is the dominant injection mechanism for a bias less than about 20 V. The electron density near the electron injecting contact is therefore given by... 

By optimization of device structures and by using different hole and electron injection or transport materials, Chen et al. achieved an excellent red OLED with a very high efficiency based on the DCJTB molecule. The OLED structure is glass (0.7 mm)/SiO2(20 nm) ITO/CFx/NPD(l 10 nm)/Alq3 5% rubrene 2%DCJTB(30 nm)/Alq3(55 nm)/LiF(0.1... 

M. Uchida, T. Izumizawa, T. Nakano, S. Yamaguchi, K. Tamao, and K. Furukawa, Structural optimization of 2,5-diarylsiloles as excellent electron-transporting materials for organic electroluminescent devices, Chem. Mater., 13 2680-2683 (2001). 

A higher efficiency, yet simpler structure PPLED device fabricated with the same dopant and host materials was almost simultaneously reported by Yang and Tsutsui [35]. The highest EQE of their device ITO/PVK 5%Ir(ppy)3 /OXD-7/Mg Ag (where ITO is indium tin oxide) (using OXD-7 (7) as an electron-transporting layer (ETL), Chart 4.3) reached the value of 7.5%, which was the first reported PLED with external efficiency above 5%, an upper limit of the fluorescent PLEDs. The power efficiency was 5.8 lm/W at the luminance of 106 cd/m2. 

Later, Yang and coworkers [84] reported similar electrophosphorescent fluorene copolymers 71 and 72, where the hole-transporting carbazole units have been introduced in the polymer backbone (Chart 4.25). Optimizing the polymer structure (comonomer ratio) and the device structure (blending with electron-transporting material PBD 8), the EQE of 4.9% has been achieved. 

Along with electronic transport improvements must come attention to substrate transport in such porous structures. As discussed above, introduction of gas-phase diffusion or liquid-phase convection of reactants is a feasible approach to enabling high-current-density operation in electrodes of thicknesses exceeding 100 jxm. Such a solution is application specific, in the sense that neither gas-phase reactants nor convection can be introduced in a subclass of applications, such as devices implanted in human, animal, or plant tissue. In the context of physiologically implanted devices, the choice becomes either milliwatt to watt scale devices implanted in a blood vessel, where velocities of up to 10 cm/s can be present, or microwatt-scale devices implanted in tissue. Ex vivo applications are more flexible, partially because gas-phase oxygen from ambient air will almost always be utilized on the cathode side, but also because pumps can be used to provide convective flow of any substrate. However, power requirements for pump operation must be minimized to prevent substantial lowering of net power output. 

Stimulated by a variety of commercial applications in fields such as xerography, solar energy conversion, thin-film active devices, and so forth, international interest in this subject area has increased dramatically since these early reports. The absence of long-range order invalidates the use of simplifying concepts such as the Bloch theorem, the counterpart of which has proved elusive for disordered systems. After more than a decade of concentrated research, there remains no example of an amorphous solid for the energy band structure, and the mode of electronic transport is still a subject for continued controversy. 

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