A new model for optimization of organic light-emitting device by concurrent incorporation of electrical and optical simulations

Abstract

To optimize the performance of organic light-emission devices (OLEDs), optical simulation or electrical simulation is often used to help designing the device structures. However, employing electrical or optical simulation separately to optimize the device might lead to incorrect conclusions. A few researches have combined optical and electrical simulations to design OLED structures by merely inserting the maximum carrier recombination rate calculated from electrical simulation into optical simulation programs, which is still insufficient for optimization of OLEDs due to lack of considering the influence of optical interference positions. In this paper, we investigate the OLED performance by using three simulation methods, pure optical, pure electrical, or combination of both, to design the devices. Using the models incorporating both electrical and optical simulations, we found that the optimal emission position occurs neither at the place with the best optical interference nor at the point where carrier recombination rate is the maximum. In order to verify the simulation results, we design the testing devices, red fluorescence OLEDs of bi-layer structures, with various positions of recombination emission. It is found that the position of recombination emission has major impact on the device performance of OLEDs, which lead to some important design rules. With integration of electrical and optical simulations, the real emission position could be predicted with excellent agreements to the experimental results. Applying this method to design the red fluorescent bi-layer OLEDs, the device with very high efficiency of 8.44 cd/A was achieved.