Fully Flexible Organic LED Fabricated by a Solution-based Process

Abstract

The current state of the art in organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) depends on the use of glass as a substrate and hence, suffer from mechanical brittleness and lack of flexibility. In this paper, a fully flexible OLED fabricated on the highly flexible substrate, namely polyethylene terephthalate (PET), using a solution-based process is proposed. In this regard, the organic materials, i.e., PEDOT:PSS and F8BT, as the hole transport layer (HTL) and emission layer (EML), respectively, are deposited by the spin-coating technique on the PET substrate coated with indium tin oxide (ITO). The experimental results show that the flexible OLED prototype has a similar emission spectrum to that of OLED fabricated on conventional ITO-coated glass. Finally, a feasible approach is recommended to further enhance the performance of the proposed flexible OLED in terms of operating voltage and ohmic losses without any impact on its flexibility.