High-Performance Blue OLEDs Based on Phenanthroimidazole Emitters via Substitutions at the C6- and C9-Positions for Improving Exciton Utilization

Donor–acceptor (D–A) molecular architecture has been shown to be an effective strategy for obtaining high-performance electroluminescent materials. In this work, two D–A molecules, Ph-BPA-BPI and Py-BPA-BPI, have been synthesized by attaching highly fluorescent phenanthrene or pyrene groups to the C6- and C9-positions of a locally excited-state emitting phenylamine–phenanthroimidazole moiety. Equipped with good physical and hybridized local and charge-transfer properties, both molecules show high performances as blue emitters in nondoped organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs). An OLED using Ph-BPA-BPI as the emitting layer exhibits deep-blue emission with CIE coordinates of (0.15, 0.08), and a maximum external quantum efficiency (EQE), current efficiency (CE), and power efficiency (PE) of 4.56 %, 3.60 cd A⁻¹, and 3.66 lm W⁻¹, respectively. On the other hand, a Py-BPA-BPI-based, sky-blue OLED delivers the best results among nondoped OLEDs with CIE_yvalues of <0.3 reported so far, for which a very low turn-on voltage of 2.15 V, CIE coordinates of (0.17, 0.29), and maximum CE, PE, and EQE values of 10.9 cd A⁻¹, 10.5 lm W⁻¹, and 5.64 %, were achieved, respectively. More importantly, both devices show little or even no efficiency roll-off and high singlet exciton-utilizing efficiencies of 36.2 % for Ph-BPA-BPI and 39.2 % for Py-BPA-BPI.