Multiple donor–acceptor design for highly luminescent and stable thermally activated delayed fluorescence emitters

A considerable variety of donor-acceptor (D-A) combinations offers the potential for realizing highly efficient thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) materials. Multiple D-A type compounds are one of the promising families of TADF materials in terms of stability as well as efficiencies. However, those emitters are always composed of carbazole-based donors despite a wide choice of moieties used in linearly linked single D-A molecules. Herein, we developed a multiple D-A type TADF compound with two distinct donor units of 9,10-dihydro-9,9-dimethylacridine (DMAC) and carbazole as the hetero-donor design. The new emitter exhibits high photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) in various conditions including polar media blend and high concentrations. Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) showed a reasonably high external quantum efficiency (EQE). In addition, we revealed that the multiple-D-A type molecules showed better photostability than the single D-A type molecules, while the operational stability in OLEDs involves dominant other factors.