Will SEL's ExTET device architecture finally enable an efficient blue OLED?

Researchers from Japan's Semiconductor Energy Laboratory (SEL) developed a new OLED device architecture that enables efficient, long-lasting and low-drive voltage OLEDs, at practical brightness levels.

The researchers call the new device architecture exciplex-triplet energy transfer, or ExTET. The image above shows the elementary process and its energy state diagram. To create the emissive layer of the ExTET, the researcher took a film with an electron-transporting material (ETM) and a hole-transporting material (HTM) and doped it with a phosphorescent dopant. Direct recombination between the electrons at the LUMO level and the hole at the HUMO level forms a charge-transfer excited complex (exciplex) - and the phosphorescent emission occurs via energy transfer from the exciplex to the dopant.