InteliSpark client, Molecular Glasses, Inc. has been awarded a Phase I grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their project, “Non-crystallizable charge transporting organic materials as OLED functional layers and thermally activated delayed fluorescence emitter-layer hosts”. In this project, Molecular Glasses will set out to accelerate the commercialization of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology. OLED is surperior to all existing technologies for color displays (e.g. TV, cell phone, computer, virtual reality, watches, etc.) in terms of energy use, display color space, and viewing angle to name a few.
OLED fixtures use very low energy, soft lightening, cast no shadow, and is architecturally flexible. However, the cost and short device lifetime has slowed commercial advancement of the product. Molecular Glasses proposed to reduce OLED cost and improve performance by utilizing a new class of photoelectric materials for the nanometer thick layers that comprise an OLED. OLED layers utilize single-component small molecules for the charge transporting and light-emitting layers. These molecules tend to crystallize and are poor solvents for the emitting molecules, causing to decrease light emission efficiency and ultimately shorten device lifetime. Molecular Glasses plans to use isomeric mixtures of designed molecules that are amorphous and non-crystallizable in all three layers. These molecules are chemically designed to meet all the required photophysical and electrical characteristics necessary for superior OLED performance. Due to the physics of charge recombination in the emitter layer there is only one technology which has the potential to harvest 100% of the injected charge as emitted light: thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF). This project will couple the new non-crystallizable technology with TADF to design and fabricate OLED devices with both high efficiency and long life to meet commercialization requirements.