Organic and hybrid organic-inorganic light emitting systems: integration in advanced lighting applications

The work performed in this thesis aims the fabrication of OLEDs and/or HYLEDs that can finally perform lighting activities once integrated in more complex opto-electronic microsystems. Both, advanced materials and new fabrication procedures have been developed to satisfy several desired market demands for commercialization of a new generation of lighting devices. Amongst these, new photolithography techniques on semiconducting polymers, and the possibility to fabricate transparent, flexible and fully solution processable devices have received special attention. Moreover, efforts have additionally been done on the replacement of ITO in an attempt to reduce the fabrication cost and cut the dependence on scarce materials, such as indium.

In addition, organic materials have been blended with inorganic quantum dots to provide a light source with the ability to change color as a function of the applied voltage. For this purpouse, the synthesis and characterization of different size quantum dots has been carried out in order to obtain a wide range of wavelength emission. Moreover, even white light from a single device has been achieved combining red (R), green (G) and blue (B) emissive components.

On the other hand, the advantage of one dimensional photonic crystals to enhance and tune the photoluminescence of emitting polymers has been studied. Optical resonators with the ability to increase the emission at certain wavelength has been built.

Merging all these advances, we have approached the market with the demostration of OLEDs as a built-in microstructured light source in optical encoders and multicolor information displays.