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The change of morphology in mixed layers due to different substrate temperature T of organic solar cells containing C60 and zinc phthalocyanine (ZnPc) is studied. Heating the substrate during deposition of the bulk heterojunction C60:ZnPc leads to a significant improvement of solar cell performance, mainly due to an increase in photocurrent and fill factor (FF). This is attributed to improved charge carrier percolation pathways within the C60:ZnPc blend. Using atomic force microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, organic field effect transistor, X-ray diffraction, and absorption measurements, we observe aggregation, cluster-like, and polycrystalline growth of the heated bulk layer. This provides better transport percolation paths by inducing a phase separation of the molecules. Heated blend layer with thickness of 60 nm shows high performance without loss in FF. When heating the substrate to the optimum temperature of 110 °C, a power conversion efficiency of 3.0% is achieved, compared to 1.4% for an identical device prepared on a substrate held at room temperature. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The key active devices of future organic electronic circuits are organic thin film transistors (OTFTs). Reliability of OTFTs remains one of the most challenging obstacles to be overcome for broad commercial applications. In particular, bias stress was identified as the key instability under operation for numerous OTFT devices and interfaces. Despite a multitude of experimental observations, a comprehensive mechanism describing this behavior is still missing. Furthermore, controlled methods to overcome these instabilities are so far lacking. Here, we present the approach to control and significantly alleviate the bias stress effect by using molecular doping at low concentrations. For pentacene and silicon oxide as gate oxide, we are able to reduce the time constant of degradation by three orders of magnitude. The effect of molecular doping on the bias stress behavior is explained in terms of the shift of Fermi Level and, thus, exponentially reduced proton generation at the pentacene/oxide interface. © 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.