A simple strategy to measure the contact resistance between metals and doped organic films

Charge injection from electrodes into doped organic films is a widespread technology used in the majority of state-of-the-art organic semiconductor devices. Although such interfaces are commonly considered to form Ohmic contacts via strong band bending, an experiment that directly measures the contact resistance has not yet been demonstrated. In this study, we use a simple metal/doped organic semiconductor/metal stack and study its voltage-dependent resistance. A transport layer thickness variation proves that the presented experiment gains direct access to the contact resistance of the device. We can quantify that for an operating current density of 10mA/cm2 the investigated material system exhibits a voltage drop over the metal/organic interface of about 200mV, which can be reduced by more than one order of magnitude when employing an additional injection layer. The presented experiment proposes a simple strategy to measure the contact resistance between any metal and doped organic film without applying numerical tools or elaborate techniques. Furthermore, the simplistic device architecture allows for very high, homogeneous, and tunable electric fields within the organic layer, which enables a clear investigation of the Poole-Frenkel effect.