A periphery cladding strategy to improve the performance of narrowband emitters, achieving deep-blue OLEDs with CIEy < 0.08 and external quantum efficiency approaching 20%

Abstract Deep-blue thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) emitters with National Television System Committee (NTSC) standard (0.14, 0.08) and narrowband emission have been one of the challenging issues for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). In this work, a novel molecular design strategy, periphery cladding, was used to design and synthesize three deep-blue multi-resonance TADF emitters, N,N, 5,9-tetraphenyl-5,9-dihydro-5,9-diaza-13b-boranaphtho[3,2,1-de]anthracen-7-amine (PAB), 2,12-di-tert-butyl-5,9-bis(4-(tert-butyl)phenyl)-N,N-diphenyl-5,9-dihydro-5,9-diaza-13b-boranaphtho[3,2,1-de]anthracen-7-amine (2tPAB) and 2,12-di-tert-butyl-N,N,5,9-tetrakis(4-(tert-butyl)phenyl)-5,9-dihydro-5,9-diaza-13b-boranaphtho[3,2,1-de]anthracen-7-amine (3tPAB). By cladding large steric hindrance tert-butyl unit at periphery of multi-resonance emitter, the intermolecular interactions were suppressed, thus reducing aggregation-induced emission quenching and improving the PLQY of emitter. 3tPAB with full periphery cladding exhibited higher PLQY (74.7%). As a result, the device based on 3tPAB acquired the best performance by using 1,3-di(9H-carbazol-9-yl)benzene (mCP) with low polarity as host. The maximum external quantum efficiency (EQEmax), CIE coordinates, and full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of 3tPAB-based device were 19.3%, (0.141, 0.076), and 26 nm, respectively. To our knowledge, this is the first report about narrowband TADF OLEDs with single host that EQEmax approaches 20% while CIE coordinates meet the NTSC blue-light standard.