Highly soluble fluorous alkyl ether-tagged imaging materials for the photo-patterning of organic light-emitting devices

A photolithographic patterning scheme for organic light-emitting diode (OLED) pixels was proposed, requiring highly soluble imaging materials in fluorous solvents. The attachment of perfluoroether chains onto a previously reported acid-cleavable resorcinarene and the addition of a semi-perfluoroalkoxy moiety to a naphthalimide backbone proved to be effective toward achieving imaging materials with enhanced solubility in fluorous solvents. These materials exhibited good film-forming and photo-imaging properties when layered onto a hole-transporting 4,4',4"-tris(N-carbazolyl) triphenylamine (TCTA) layer without seriously damaging it. With the proposed scheme and benign imaging materials, it was possible to construct OLEDs with patterned pixels as small as 50 mu m.