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Thermally Evaporated Organic/Ag/Organic Multilayer Transparent Conducting Electrode for Flexible Organic Light‐Emitting Diodes
Author(s) -
Bae Hyeong Woo,
Kim Seong Keun,
Lee Subin,
Song MinGeun,
Lampande Raju,
Kwon Jang Hyuk
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
advanced electronic materials
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.25
H-Index - 56
ISSN - 2199-160X
DOI - 10.1002/aelm.201900620
Subject(s) - materials science , oled , optoelectronics , layer (electronics) , flexible display , substrate (aquarium) , quantum efficiency , electrode , composite material , thin film transistor , oceanography , chemistry , geology
This paper reports an efficient, thermally stable, and high‐performance flexible multilayer transparent conducting electrode (TCE) by sandwiching an ultrathin Ag layer between a thermally evaporated small‐molecule organic wetting inducer, 1,4‐bis(2‐phenyl‐1,10‐phenanthrolin‐4‐yl)benzene and an organic antireflective capping layer, 1,4,5,8,9,11‐hexaazatriphenylene hexacarbonitrile for flexible organic light‐emitting diodes (OLEDs). This TCE demonstrates a high transmittance of about 81.34% at 550 nm and very low sheet resistance of 9.51 Ω sq −1 with excellent thermal stability under high‐temperature (100 °C for 72 h) conditions. These properties arise from the synergistic effect of coordinate bonding between the nitrogen of the phenanthroline moiety and the Ag atom which leads to a smooth and uniform Ag surface and the outstanding optical properties of the capping layer. Moreover, this TCE on a plastic substrate shows excellent mechanical flexibility and durability under continuous bending stress (bending radius of 5 mm) with a very slight increase in corresponding resistance (9.90 Ω sq −1 ) after 2000 bending cycles. The green phosphorescent OLED with this TCE reveals excellent current efficiency of 75.1 cd A −1 and external quantum efficiency of 23.1% at a luminance of 3000 cd m −2 . These results suggest that the studied TCE will be very useful for next‐generation flexible active matrix OLED display applications.