Fault-tolerant, scalable organic light-emitting device architecture

High performance organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) become problematic as emitting area increases due to the high resistivity of the transparent electrode and the increasing probability of encountering a catastrophic short-circuit defect during fabrication. In this letter, a monolithic series-connected OLED architecture is demonstrated. It is shown that such devices exhibit the same power efficiency as traditional small area OLEDs but are, in addition, relatively insensitive to electrode resistivity and tolerant to normally catastrophic short-circuit defects. This architecture should enable applications such as lighting where scalability to large emitting area without high fabrication cost or design complexity is required. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.