Universal 3D crosslinkers for all-solution-processed electronics

Abstract

Fabrication of electronic components at high resolution with solution-processing remains a big huddle for organic electronic devices. We report the all-solution processing of highly integrated arrays of organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs), organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), and quantum-dot light-emitting diodes (QD-LEDs). This processing is performed using newly developed multi-bridge photo-crosslinkers containing 4 or 6 photo-crosslinkable units. Under UV, photo-crosslinkers mixed within solution-processable electronic materials generate a three-dimensional (3D) network of the given host electronic materials. To our surprise, our photo-crosslinkers can yield the 3D network state efficiently even at an unprecedentedly small loading (only 1 or lower wt%), without sacrifice of the intrinsic electrical properties of the photo-crosslinked active material. It is equally important that the crosslinking of electronic component layers allows not only micropatterning of the layers at high resolution (< 5 µm) but also stacking of a given electronic component layer on top of the other layers.[1-3] Furthermore, our efficient photo-crosslinkers enable to produce an ultrathin polymer gate dielectric, the application of which results in excellent hole and electron mobilities of 12.4 and 10.1 cm2 V-1s-1, respectively, from p- and n-type OTFTs operated at < 3 V.[4] These works demonstrate that the use of photo-crosslinkers paves a new avenue to fabricate future electronic devices.

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