The rapid advancement of the electronics industry is opening new possibilities for the development of increasingly advanced device components, including displays. Many of the most widely used and highly performing displays developed to date are based on organic light-emitting diodes (OLED), devices based on organic materials that emit light when an electric current is applied to them.
Compared to conventional displays based on liquid crystals, OLED-based displays do not require a backlight and can thus consume significantly less power. Despite their energy-efficiency, the performance of OLEDs, in terms of image quality and color rendition, has been found to decline as the density of pixels increases, due to undesired interactions between adjacent pixels referred to as electrical crosstalk.
Electronics engineers have devised various strategies to overcome this limitation, most of which entail increasing the thickness of an OLED component known as the hole transport layer (HTL), which facilitates the movement of holes in the devices. Yet these strategies can compromise a display's energy-efficiency, due to increases in the devices' driving voltages.
Researchers at Hanyang University, Yonsei University and Sogang University in South Korea recently introduced an alternative approach to reduce electrical crosstalk between pixels, which could in turn boost the performance and efficiency of OLED displays.
Their proposed solution, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, involves the use of a silicon-integrated small-molecule hole transport layer (SI-HTL) patterned using microlithography, a well-established technique to precisely structure materials on a microscopic scale.
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