Boosting the performance of red PHOLEDs by exciton harvesting

Abstract

Significant development has been made on phosphorescent organic light emitting diodes (PHOLEDs) over the past decade, which eventually resulted in the commercialization of widely distributed active-matrix organic light emitting diode displays for mobile phones. However, higher efficiency PHOLEDs are still needed to further reduce the cost and lower the power consumption for general lighting and LED backlight applications. In particular, red PHOLEDs currently have in general the lowest efficiencies among the three primary colors, due most likely to the energy-gap law. Therefore, a number of groups have of made use of various device configurations, including insertion of a carrier blocking or exciton confining layer, doping the transport layers, as well as employing multiple emissive zone structures to improve the device efficiency. However, these approaches are rather inconvenient for commercial applications. In this work, we have developed a simpler way to boost the performance of red PHOLEDs by incorporating an exciton harvesting green emitter, which transfers a large portion of the energy to the co-deposited red emitter. A high external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 20.6% was achieved, which is among the best performances for red PHOLEDs.