As part of project GLADIATOR, The Fraunhofer Institute FEP will show an innovative organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) with a graphene-based electrode at Plastic Electronics 2015. The fabricated OLED on transparent graphene electrodes has been realized on a small area, and the target of the next one and a half years of the project is to successfully achieve large area OLEDs.
With graphene as an electrode, the researchers at the Fraunhofer FEP hope for flexible devices with higher stability. The electrode contains CVD-produced monolayer graphene of high quality, supplied by Graphenea, in order to compete with the reference material ITO (which graphene, in this case, replaces), the transparency and conductivity of graphene must be very high. Therefore, not only the process of electrode manufacturing is being optimized, but also different ways of doping graphene to improve its properties are being examined.
The Fraunhofer FEP is coordinating the GLADIATOR project and acts as an end-user of the graphene electrode. The GLADIATOR project will run until April 2017. By this time several types of OLED are planned to have been made using graphene electrodes: a white OLED with an area of about 42 (cm)2 to demonstrate the high conductivity, and a fully-flexible, transparent OLED with an area of 3 (cm)2 to confirm the mechanical reliability.