A novel neutral red derivative for applications in high-performance red-emitting electroluminescent devices

A new compound with intramolecular charge transfer (ICT) character-neutral red derivative (I)-was designed and synthesized. The new compound is strongly fluorescent in nonpolar and moderately polar solvents. Using this material as a dopant, we fabricated electroluminescent (EL) devices with a structure of indium tin oxide (ITO) coated glass/ N,N'-bis(1-naphthyl)-N,N'-diphenyl-1,1'-biphenyl-4,4'-diamine (NPB) (60 nm)/tris(8-hydroxyquinolinato)aluminum (Alq(3)):dopant (30 nm)/Alq(3) (20 mn)/Mg-Ag (200 nm). The device showed orange-to-red EL emission with good efficiency and high brightness. The device with a doping concentration of 1 wt % exhibited a high brightness of 18400 cd/m(2) at a driving voltage of 13 V, and the current efficiency is 5.2 cd/A at a current density of 20 mA/cm(2). An important feature of the device is its fairly constant current efficiency over a wide range of current density from 1 mA/cm(2) to as high as 500 mA/cm(2) at different doping concentrations. The current devices show obvious advantages over many reported red-emitting OLEDs, which show significant drops in efficiency as the current density. and/or dopant concentration increases. The present red dopant is particularly suitable for passive-matrix display applications where a high excitation density is required.