Multilayer Approach in Light-Emitting Transistors

Abstract

1.1 OLED Vs. OLET Plastic electronics, i.e. electronics based on organic polymer and molecular semiconductors, is a key low-cost technology for new vast application areas. The scope of applications in plastic electronics is virtually endless. It ranges from opto-electronic devices and flexible organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) displays, to ultra-cheap, radio-frequency identification tags that can replace the now ubiquitous bar-codes, and to wearable computing and electronic bio-interfaces. The first demonstration of the OLED dates back to the 1960s when electrically driven light emission from non-crystalline organic materials was first observed. After that, several studies were carried out by academic groups and companies (Kodak, Pioneer, Motorola, NEC, etc...) both for fundamental physics comprehension and application purposes. Nowadays electronic products containing displays are becoming more and more portable. Therefore, they need some peculiarities like lightweightness, flexibility, brightness, etc... These, with many others, are the strong points of the OLEDs. In fact they are thinner, lighter and more flexible with respect to their inorganic counterpart. Moreover, OLEDs can be as bright as LEDs and they consume much less power. Due to the organic processability, they are easier to produce and can be made on larger area. Finally OLEDs have large fields of view, about 170 degrees, a significantly advantage over, for example, liquid crystal displays. Of course, these devices present also some disadvantages: they have typically shorter lifetime (in particular lifetime of the blue emitter is critical, about 1.000 hours), they are not very stable and can easily be contaminated by water or oxygen. In general, with respect to OLEDs, organic light-emitting transistors (OLETs) present some fascinating characteristics which overcome many physical and technical drawbacks in the realization of nano-scale integrated electroluminescent devices. The main difference between the vertical (OLED) and planar (OLET) device geometry is a direct consequence of the different device structures. In OLED, charge transport occurs perpendicular to the organic layers (bulk charge transport) while in OLET the transport occurs horizontally (field-effect charge transport). Under the typical biasing conditions, the electron and hole mobility can be about four orders of magnitude higher in OLETs than in OLEDs, thus affecting directly the material lifetime and exciton emission. In a typical OLED structure, the minority carriers travel only few tens