Exciplex System with Increased Donor–Acceptor Distance as the Sensitizing Host for Conventional Fluorescent OLEDs with High Efficiency and Extremely Low Roll-Off

Exciplex systems with efficient thermally activated delayed fluorescence as the sensitizing hosts for fluorescent organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have been flourished recently, while the device performances are still lagging behind. Here, a donor molecule sterically encapsulated with tert-butyl units is designed and synthesized to increase the donor–acceptor separation in an exciplex system, leading to reduced singlet-triplet energy gap (ΔESTs) and improved reverse intersystem crossing (RISC) efficiency. OLEDs utilizing exciplexes with increased donor–acceptor distance (rDA) as the hosts for conventional fluorescent dopants exhibit a maximum external quantum efficiency (EQEmax) as high as 16.5%, benefiting from the enhanced RISC process and suppressed exciton loss by the Dexter interaction. Furthermore, extremely low efficiency roll-off is obtained with EQEs of 16.2% at 5000 cd/m2 and 15.2% at 10 000 cd/m2. The results here represent the state-of-the-art performances for devices based on exciplexes as the hosts for conventional fluorescent dopants, manifesting the superiority of exciplexes with increased rDA as the sensitizing hosts for fluorescent dopants.