Simulation of Charge Carriers in Organic Electronic Devices: Methods with their Fundamentals and Applications

Device modeling is an established tool to design and optimize organic electronic
devices, be them organic light emitting diodes, organic photovoltaic devices, or organic transistors and thin-film transistors. Further, reliable device simulations form the basis for elaborate experimental characterizations of crucial mechanisms encountered in such devices. The present contribution collects and compares contemporary model approaches to describe charge transport in devices. These approaches comprise kinetic Monte Carlo, the master equation, drift-diffusion, and equivalent circuit analysis. This overview particularly aims at highlighting the following three aspects for each method: i) The foundation of a method including inherent assumptions and capabilities, ii) how the nature of organic semiconductors enters the model, and iii) how major tuning handles required to control the device operation are accounted for, namely temperature, external field, and provision of mobile carriers. As these approaches form a hierarchy of models suitable for multiscale modeling, this contribution also points out less established or even missing links between the approaches.