Design of a Structure for Optimized Optical Performance of a Full Colored Organic Light-Emitting Diode on a Parameter Space Map

Abstract

In general, optical properties of a top-emitting organic light-emitting diode (OLED) are dependent on the cavity effect of the OLED structure. Therefore, the optical path length of the many thin solid films in the OLED, which is strongly affected by the refractive index and thickness of each material, controls the cavity effect of the cell. In previous research, a parameter space method for optimizing the inorganic layer thickness of a red OLED structure was introduced to achieve the required bandwidth and peak wavelength. This is a simple method with high accuracy and can also be applied to red, green, and blue OLED structures. To design an OLED cell with a practical approach, however, the RGB OLED device requires the thickness of each inorganic layer and organic layer in all three R, G, and B OLED structures to be same. In this study, we applied the parameter space method to an RGB OLED device to find out and optimize the thickness of three inorganic parameters: Indium Tin Oxide (ITO), cathode, and capping layer (CPL) using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The parameters ITO, cathode, and CPL were scanned from 18 to 21 nm, 5 to 100 nm, and 10 to 200 nm, respectively. The peak wavelength and bandwidth lines of the three spectral colors were placed on a map of the three inorganic layer thickness parameters to find the optimized points that can provide the desired optical characteristics with the same film thickness in the cell.