Interface Trap States in Organic Photodiodes

Organic semiconductors are attractive for optical sensing applications due to the effortless processing on large active area of several cm(2), which is difficult to achieve with solid-state devices. However, compared to silicon photodiodes, sensitivity and dynamic behavior remain a major challenge with organic sensors. Here, we show that charge trapping phenomena deteriorate the bandwidth of organic photodiodes (OPDs) to a few Hz at low-light levels. We demonstrate that, despite the large OPD capacitances of ~10 nF cm(-2), a frequency response in the kHz regime can be achieved at light levels as low as 20 nW cm(-2) by appropriate interface engineering, which corresponds to a 1000-fold increase compared to state-of-the-art OPDs. Such device characteristics indicate that large active area OPDs are suitable for industrial sensing and even match medical requirements for single X-ray pulse detection in the millisecond range.