Area dependent behavior of bathocuproine (BCP) as cathode interfacial layers in organic photovoltaic cells

Standard and inverted configuration small molecule OPV cells incorporating bathocuproine (BCP) as electron transport and exciton blocking layer is investigated, demonstrating that 2 mm² standard and inverted cells display a maximum performance for BCP thicknesses of 10 nm and 1.5 nm, respectively. The reason for the different optimum BCP thicknesses for the two device configurations is the BCP-metal complex formed between the Ag electrode and the BCP layer in the standard configuration OPV devices. Interestingly, at optimum BCP thicknesses, the inverted OPV cells outperform the standard devices. Upon up-scaling of the device area of the cells from 2 mm² to 10 and 100 mm², device failure becomes prominent for the inverted OPV cells, due to aggregation of the evaporated BCP layer on the ITO surface. This demonstrates that although BCP can be adopted for efficient ETL in inverted configuration OPV devices on small scale, it is not suitable for device up-scaling due to severely decreasing device yields. In this work, a possible solution where an ultrathin layer of C₇₀ is evaporated between the ITO and BCP layer is proposed. It is demonstrated that the proposed solution holds a strong potential to minimize the device failures of the BCP based inverted OPV cells to a significant extent, while maintaining good device performances.