Advanced Heterostructures for Polymer Organic Semiconductor Devices

Abstract

Heterostructures are central to efficient manipulation of charge carriers, excitons and photons for high performance semiconductor devices. The development of heterostructures has been hampered previously by the dissolution of the underlayers unless orthogonal solvents are used. Therefore work in this thesis has focused on heterostructures fabricated with a non-specific azide photocrosslinking methodology to circumvent the dissolution problem. As a consequence, not only the traditional planar type heterostructures are possible, but also the novel nanotextured types due to the soft nature of these organic semiconductors. Performance gains across both polymer organic light-emitting diodes and organic photovoltaic solar cells have been measured. Furthermore the use of chemical doping to create ultrahigh work function heterostructures and ohmic contacts has also been demonstrated. Thus new opportunities for the design and control of plastic electronic devices have been opened.