Surface energy modification of metal oxide to enhance electron injection in light-emitting devices : charge balance in hybrid OLEDs and OLETs

Abstract: Organic semiconductors (OSCs) present an electron mobility lower by several orders of magnitude than the hole mobility, giving rise to an electron-hole charge imbalance in organic devices such as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and organic light-emitting transistors (OLETs). In this thesis project, I tried to achieve an efficient electron transport and injection properties in opto-electronic devices, using inorganic n-type metal oxides (MOs) instead of organic n-type materials and a polyethyleneimine ethoxylated (PEIE) thin layer as electron transport (ETLs) and injection layers (EILs), respectively. In the first part of this thesis, inverted OLEDs were fabricated in order to study the effect of the PEIE layer in-between ZnO and two different emissive layers (EMLs): poly(9,9-dioctylfluorene-alt-benzothiadiazole) polymer (F8BT) and tris(8-hydroxyquinolinato) aluminum small molecule (Alq3), based on a solution and thermal evaporation processes, respectively. Different concentrations (0.80 %, 0.40 %) of PEIE layers were used to further study electron injection capability in OLEDs. After a series of optimizations in the fabrication process, the opto-electrical characterization showed high-performance of devices. The inverted OLEDs reported a maximum luminance over 104 cd m-2 and a maximum external quantum efficiency (EQE) around 1.11 %. The results were attributed to the additional PEIE layer which provided a good electron injection from MOs into EMLs. In the last part of the thesis, OLETs were fabricated and discussed by directly transferring the energy modification layer from OLEDs to OLETs. As metal oxide layer, ZnO:N was employed for OLETs since ZnO:N-based thin film transistors (TFTs) showed better performance than ZnO-based TFTs. Finally, due to their short life-time, OLETs were characterized electrically but not optically.