Reversible soft-contact lamination and delamination for non-invasive fabrication and characterization of bulk-heterojunction and bilayer organic solar cells

Soft-contact lamination (ScL) provides a means to non-invasively establish electrical contact in organic solar cells. In contrast to the typical bottom-up fabrication approaches wherein active components are deposited sequentially in a layer-by-layer fashion, ScL allows individual functional layers to be separately deposited and optimized before these isolated components are brought together to complete the devices. Lamination and delamination of top electrodes to and from the active layer, respectively, are reversible and thus enables the characterization of the once-buried active layer after device processing and testing. ScL also enables the fabrication and characterization of bilayer organic solar cells comprising electron donors and electron acceptors that have comparable solubilities, the fabrication of which would not have been possible with the standard bottom-up approaches.