Organic Light-Emitting Diodes Formed by Soft Contact Lamination

Organic optoelectronic materials enable new classes of devices that could be important for consumer eletronics. Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) [1,2], for example, form the basis of ultrathin and power efficient mechanically flexible display systems. Although tremendous progress has been made on the materials, with few exceptions OLEDs are fabricated in the standard way by sequentially depositing active layers and electrodes onto a substrate. Here we describe a different approach for building OLEDs, which is based on physical lamination of thin metal electrodes supported by an elastomeric layer against an electroluminscent organic. This method relies only on van der Waals interactions to establish spatially homogeneous, intimate contacts between the electrodes and the organic [3].