Fabrication of nanoscale quantum-dot organic light-emitting devices on Si substrate

We report a quantum-dot (QD) organic light-emitting diode (OLED) structure formed on Si substrate scaled down to nanometer dimensions. In our proposed OLED, the junction area is defined by a non-lithographically patterned oxide layer on Si substrate. We utilized gold nanoparticles as oxygen barrier mask during thermal oxidation of Si. Previously, we demonstrated a carrier injection mechanism originating from the two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) system available at the SiO2/Si interface [4]. The electron injection, as well as the resulting luminescence, is found to occur predominantly at the junction's periphery, not area, resulting in a low turn-on voltage (∼1–2 V). An efficient way to increase total device perimeter is to reduce the size of the device. In this report, we demonstrated a cost-effective non-lithographic method to fabricate nanoscale OLEDs with a dense distribution to increase total device perimeter without requiring extra substrate area.