Zhibin Yu, assistant professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Florida State and a team of researchers have created a single layer LED. They fabricated the LED with a combination of organic and inorganic materials to make the material. The material can dissolve and can be applied like paint. When electricity is applied to the material, which is sandwiched between indium tin oxide and an indium-gallium eutectic alloy, it can emit red, blue, or green light.
The ionically conductive thin film forms a p-i-n homojunction with the intrinsically doped layer between a p-doped layer and an n-doped layer. Yu notes that the device is much easier to manufacture than existing LEDs on the market.
Instead of using four or five layers of materials like most LEDs, the team’s material only requires one layer. The material is a perovskite and poly(ethylene oxide) composite thin film. The team detailed the development in the journal Advanced Materials. The research resulted in an award from the National Science Foundation to further investigate the materials and establish a processing platform for the developing intrinsically stretchable, active-matrix organic LED displays.
