Inkjet-printed high-performance and mechanically flexible organic photodiodes for optical wireless communication

Area of Science:

• Optoelectronics
• Organic semiconductors
• Digital printing technologies

Background:

• Emerging applications like the Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks demand cost-efficient, high-performance optoelectronic devices.
• Organic semiconductors offer unique advantages for fabricating conformable optical devices using digital printing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To fabricate and characterize high-performance organic photodiodes (OPDs).
• To evaluate OPDs as optical receivers in indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems.
• To compare different fabrication methods (spin-coated, partially-printed, fully-printed) and their impact on device performance.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of organic photodiodes (OPDs) using spin-coating and digital printing techniques.
• Characterization of OPD performance, including detection speed.
• Integration and testing of OPDs in a visible light communication (VLC) system.
• Comparison of device performance on rigid and flexible substrates.

Main Results:

• Fabricated OPDs demonstrated state-of-the-art performance and achieved faster detection speeds than previously reported organic receivers in VLC systems.
• High performance was maintained when the fabrication process was transferred to a fully-inkjet-printed method.
• Performance on flexible substrates showed minimal differences compared to rigid samples (spectral efficiency: 0.2 b s⁻¹ Hz⁻¹, data rate: 2.9 Mb s⁻¹).

Conclusions:

• Fully-inkjet-printed organic photodiodes are suitable for high-performance optical receivers in visible light communication systems.
• The use of organic semiconductors and digital printing enables the creation of conformable and high-speed optoelectronic devices.
• These findings support the advancement of flexible and cost-efficient optical devices for IoT and wireless communication applications.