Electrochemical deposition of patterning and highly luminescent organic films for light emitting diodes

This paper describes a simple electrochemical deposition (ED) technique to prepare luminescent and patterned films for light-emitting devices (LEDs). The luminescent films are deposited directly on the patterned ITO (indium tin oxide) electrodes through an oxidation coupling reaction of an electroactive and luminescent precursor. The ED films deposited on the ITO strips (width of 200 µm) exhibit smooth surface morphology (roughness of morphology surface of 3.1 nm), small roughness in electrode edge of 1–2 µm and high fluorescence quantum efficiency (>60%). The LEDs with structure ITO/ED film/Ba/Al show pure blue emission (CIE coordinates of (0.16, 0.07)), high brightness of 3080 cd m −2 and the maximum external quantum efficiency of 0.60%. (Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version)