Though organic light emitting diodes are being commercialized in many applications, issues relating to lifetime and degradation remain as fundamental concerns limiting performance. A coherent understanding of degradation mechanisms is yet to emerge. We focus on intrinsic degradation of high quality Alq3 based diodes due to electrical stressing. We monitor progressive luminance degradation and recovery by introducing well defined relaxation time windows in the current stress cycles. The method helps to clearly distinguish between recoverable and permanent degradation systematically. The voltage shift due to degradation and recovery is also monitored as a function of time. Further, we introduce a method of reconstructing the transients of the recoverable part using progressive isolated current pulses as a probe. The recovery of degradation is related to the charging and discharging of the traps in the device and our method provides a technique of measuring significant parameters of trapping through luminance transients. The origin and distinguishing features of the two types of degradation are discussed.
The relation between electrically active defects in organic and polymeric semiconductor materials and degradation of devices such as loss of luminance is currently not understood. In this paper, we study defect related charge processes using electrical transients in polymeric and organic diodes. We monitor slow charging and discharging currents as a function of time for both virgin and electrically aged devices. The current transients are analyzed spectroscopically in time domain using a technique called Time Analyzed Transient Spectroscopy, which is similar to DLTS in its implementation. We observe highly stretched exponentials over 3-4 orders of magnitude in time up to thousands of seconds indicating existence of large distribution in time constants in aged PLED devices. We demonstrate ability to distinguish between different mechanisms of charge storage related to defect related processes in typical OLED and PLED.
We have studied photovoltage spectra of PPV thin films using both conventional single layer LED structure (ITO/PPV/Al), and capacitive structure consisting of ITO/Mica/PPV/ITO films. The photovoltage spectra for both types of devices have sharp features and are identical indicating that the features observed are primarily due to PPV material itself. We observed two sharp peaks in the energy range of 2.5 -2.7 eV (i.e. above HOMO-LUMO gap) in photovoltage spectrum. The lineshape of the peaks strongly suggests that the peaks are most probably associated with photoionization of excitons. Temperature dependence of spectral lineshape of photocurrent peaks has been studied in the range of 80K-300K. The magnitudes of photocurrent peaks are weakly dependent on temperature, while other spectral features such as peak position and peak width are nearly independent of temperature. On the basis of absorbance, photovoltage and PL spectra, we conclude that both polarons and photoionization of excitons contribute to steady state photovoltage spectra.
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