Recent advances in research and development of microfluidic organic light-emitting devices

Liquid organic semiconductors (LOSs) have been an attractive class of functional materials for next generation organic electronic devices. In 2009, a liquid organic light-emitting diode (Liquid OLED), which consists of LOS in the active layer, was proposed by Xu and Adachi. Although several papers have reported on an improvement in device performance, from the viewpoint of the device architecture, there are challenges associated with multi-color electroluminescence (EL) emissions. In order to integrate multiple individual liquid OLEDs on one substrate, we have developed multi-color microfluidic OLEDs which have single-m-thick microchannels sandwiched between two electrodes. This paper presents a brief overview of the authors’ own recent progress on the microfluidic OLED technologies, including fabrication methodology for electro-microfluidic devices and demonstration of multi- and white-color EL emissions using pyrene-based LOSs. We believe that the proposed microfluidic OLEDs can be promising for novel liquid-based device applications.