Fibertronic Organic Light-Emitting Diodes toward Fully Addressable, Environmentally Robust, Wearable Displays

Abstract

Significant potential of electronic textiles for wearable applications has triggered active studies of luminescent fibers toward smart textile displays. In spite of notable breakthroughs in the lighting fiber technology, a class of information displays with a luminescent fiber network is still underdeveloped due to several formidable challenges such as limited electroluminescence fiber performance, acute vulnerability to chemical and mechanical factors, and lack of decent engineering schemes to form fibers with robust interconnectable pixels for two-dimensional matrix addressing. Here, we present a highly feasible strategy for organic light-emitting diode (OLED) fiber-based textile displays that can overcome these issues by implementing prominent solution options including compatible fabrication method of OLED pixel arrays on adapted fiber configurations and chemically/mechanically sturdy but electrically conductive passivation system. To create solid interconnectable OLED fibers without compromising the high electroluminescence performance, phosphorescence OLED materials are deposited onto process-friendly fibers of rectangular stripes, where periodically patterned OLED pixels are selectively passivated with robust polymer and circumventing metal pads by a stamp-assisted printing method. A woven textile of interlaced interconnectable OLED fibers with perpendicularly arranged conductive fibers serves as a matrix-addressable two-dimensional network that can be operated by the passive matrix scheme. Successful demonstrations of stably working woven OLED textile in the water, as well as under the applied tensile force, support feasibility of the present approach to reify fully addressable, environmentally durable, fiber-based textile displays.

A substrateless, flexible, and water-resistant organic light-emitting diode

“…Ultrathin OLEDs with impressive flexibility have been reported 11,[14][15][16][17][18][19] , but for such ultrathin devices stable operation under ambient or even aqueous conditions has not been achieved, with lifetimes in air still only in the range of tens of hours typically. The main challenge in manufacturing reliable flexible OLEDs is the extreme sensitivity of organic semiconductors to moisture and oxygen.…”

Light-Emitting Textiles: Device Architectures, Working Principles, and Applications

“…Furthermore, thanks to the mechanical stability of the fiber, all QLEDs keep 72% lighting at 90 • bending, as is visible in Figure 4c. OLED pixels on stripe-shaped PET fibers were also fabricated and were subsequently assembled with conductive fibers to obtain a passive matrix-based textile [74]. The OLED was based on thermal evaporated phosphorescent material as an emitting layer and it showed a maximum current efficiency of about 46 cd/A.…”

Unconventional Device and Material Approaches for Monolithic Biointegration of Implantable Sensors and Wearable Electronics

“…Organic materials were first considered as a promising candidate for wearable applications owing to their intrinsic flexibility. [ 145–147 ] However, imparting stretchability to light‐emitting devices is challenging considering the difficulty in developing the entire device layers featuring intrinsic stretchability. Although a few previous studies have successfully demonstrated the fabrication of stretchable light‐emitting devices, these devices were limited by the charge transfer efficiency and the consequent loss in photonic performances owing to the use of non‐stretchable charge‐carrying layers, which are subject to cracking and deterioration upon stretching.…”