Boron-Dipyrromethene-Based Fluorescent Emitters Enable High-Performance Narrowband Red Organic Light-Emitting Diodes

Narrowband organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are receiving significant attention and have demonstrated impressive performance in blue and green OLEDs. However, developing high-performance narrowband red OLEDs remains a highly desired yet challenging task. Herein, we have developed narrowband red fluorescent emitters by utilizing a boron-dipyrromethene (BODIPY) skeleton in combination with a methyl-shield strategy. These emitters exhibit small full-width at half-maxima (FWHM) ranging from 21 nm (0.068 eV) to 25 nm (0.081 eV) and high photoluminescence quantum yields (& phi;(PL)) ranging from 88.5 % to 99.0 % in toluene solution. Using BODIPY-based luminescent materials as emitters, high-performance narrowband red OLEDs have been assembled with external quantum efficiency as high as 18.3 % at 623 nm and 21.1 % at 604 nm. This work represents, to our knowledge, the first successful case of achieving NTSC pure-red OLEDs with the Commission Internationale de l'eclairage (CIE) coordinates of [0.67, 0.33] based on conventional fluorescent emitters.