Printable SnO2 cathode interlayer with up to 500 nm thickness-tolerance for high-performance and large-area organic solar cells

Abstract

The printable electrode interlayer with excellent thickness tolerance is crucial for mass production of organic solar cells (OSCs) by solution-based print techniques. Herein, high-quality printable SnO2 films are simply fabricated by spin-coating or blade-coating the chemical precipitated SnO2 colloid precursor with post thermal annealing treatment. The SnO2 films possess outstanding optical and electrical properties, especially extreme thickness-insensitivity. The interfacial electron trap density of SnO2 cathode interlayers (CILs) are very low and show negligible increase as the thicknesses increase from 10 to 160 nm, resulting in slight change of the power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of the PM6:Y6 based OSCs from 16.10% to 13.07%. For blade-coated SnO2 CIL, the PCE remains high up to 12.08% even the thickness of SnO2 CIL is high up to 530 nm. More strikingly, the large-area OSCs of 100 mm2 with printed SnO2 CILs obtain a high efficiency of 12.74%. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first example for the high-performance and large-area OSCs with the thickness-insensitive SnO2 CIL.