Organic electroluminescent device: current status and future prospect

Summary form only given. Today, some electroluminescent devices show luminance of over 100,000 cd/m/sup 2/ and quantum efficiencies of more than 4.0%. One of the advantages of organics over inorganics is that organic materials can be designed and synthesized for a certain purpose. For example, molecular weight of organic compound can be low or high depending on application. Today, most efficient EL devices are composed of small molecules with a low molecular weight. In these devices, materials are vacuum deposited and made into multilayer structure to achieve high efficiencies. Emission color of the device depends on the materials used as the emitter layer, and three primary colors of blue, green and red can be obtained at high brightness levels. Emission with very sharp spectral bands can be obtained by using lanthanide complexes and white light by combining several fluorescent dyes.