Facile synthesis of self-host functional iridium dendrimers up to the fourth generation with N-phenylcarbazole-based polyether dendrons for non-doped phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes

Abstract

A facile synthesis has been demonstrated for the first time to construct self-host functional Ir-cored dendrimers up to the fourth generation on the basis of a newly developed polyether dendron, where the N-phenylcarbazole (NPC) moiety is used as the basic building block instead of benzene to improve charge transport whilst keeping the ease of preparation. With the growing generation number, the dendrimer size can be well tuned in a wide range of 4–10 nm. The obtained fourth generation dendrimer 45NPC-G4 is the largest Ir complex ever reported so far, having a diameter up to 10 nm and a molecular weight as high as 15.9 kDa. Most interestingly, the performance of non-doped phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes (PhOLEDs) is found to be greatly dependent on the molecular size. For example, 9NPC-G2 (R ≈ 30 Å) reveals the best luminous efficiency as high as 50.5 cd A⁻¹ (56.6 lm W⁻¹, 14.8%), whereas the efficiency of 45NPC-G4 (R ≈ 50 Å) sharply drops to 10.5 cd A⁻¹ (5.6 lm W⁻¹, 3.4%). The results suggest that an appropriate size of 6 ± 2 nm is desirable to balance the dilemma between luminescence quenching and charge transport, and thereby realize highly efficient non-doped PhOLEDs.