Polymer light-emitting logos processed by ink-jet printing technology

Abstract

Ink-jet printing (IJP) technology is a popular technology for desktop publishing. Since some of the conducting polymers are solution processable, IJP technology becomes an ideal method for printing polymer light-emitting diodes with high resolution. In this manuscript, we present the first successful demonstration of patterning the polymer electroluminescent devices using the IJP technology. Unfortunately due to the dot form printing by the IJP, the polymer film printed from an ink-jet printer consists of pin-holes. This makes it unsuitable for fabricating high quality polymer electronic devices, particularly for devices in the sandwich structure. In this paper, we submit a hybrid structure, which consists of an ink-jet printed layer in conjunction with another uniform spin coated polymer layer, as an alternative to the regular ink-jet printed structure. The uniform spin coated polymer layer, as an alternative to the regular ink-jet printed structure. The uniform layer serves as a buffer layer to seal the pin hoe.s and the IJP layer is the layer consisting of the desired pattern, for example the red-green-blue dots for a multicolor display. To demonstrate, we applied this hybrid technology to fabricate efficient and large area polymer light-emitting logos. The use of this concept represents a whole new technology of fabricating polymer electronic device with lateral patterning capability.