Bifunctional Heterocyclic Spiro Derivatives for Organic Optoelectronic Devices

A series of heterocyclic spiro derivatives has been successfully synthesized and characterized by photophysical and electrochemical studies. Taking advantage of their excellent hole-transporting properties, highly efficient small-molecular organic photovoltaic devices based on these heterocyclic compounds as donors with very low dopant concentrations have been prepared; particularly, a high open-circuit voltage of up to 1.10 V and a power conversion efficiency of up to 5.12% have been realized. In addition, most of these heterocyclic spiro derivatives are found to be highly emissive in solutions with photoluminescence quantum yields of up to 0.91, and high-performance deep-blue-emitting organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have been achieved. Such devices exhibit a stable deep blue emission with CIE coordinates of (0.16, 0.04) and high external quantum efficiencies of up to 4.7%, which is one of the best values among the reported OLEDs with CIE_y < 0.08.