Proceedings Article | 5 October 2015
KEYWORDS: Transistors, Organic light emitting diodes, Switching, OLED lighting, Polymers, Molecules, Crystals, N-type semiconductors, P-type semiconductors, Semiconductors
Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are well studied and established in current display applications. Light-emitting transistors (LETs) have been developed to further simplify the necessary circuitry for these applications, combining the switching capabilities of a transistor with the light emitting capabilities of an OLED. Such devices have been studied using mono- and bilayer geometries and a variety of polymers [1], small organic molecules [2] and single crystals [3] within the active layers. Current devices can often suffer from low carrier mobilities and most operate in p-type mode due to a lack of suitable n-type organic charge carrier materials. Hybrid light-emitting transistors (HLETs) are a logical step to improve device performance by harnessing the charge carrier capabilities of inorganic semiconductors [4].
We present state of the art, all solution processed hybrid light-emitting transistors using a non-planar contact geometry [1, 5]. We will discuss HLETs comprised of an inorganic electron transport layer prepared from a sol-gel of zinc tin oxide and several organic emissive materials. The mobility of the devices is found between 1-5 cm2/Vs and they had on/off ratios of ~105. Combined with optical brightness and efficiencies of the order of 103 cd/m2 and 10-3-10-1 %, respectively, these devices are moving towards the performance required for application in displays.
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