Stretchable organic light-emitting devices are becoming increasingly important in the fast-growing fields of wearable displays, biomedical devices and health-monitoring technology. Although highly stretchable devices have been demonstrated, their luminous efficiency and mechanical stability remain impractical for the purposes of real-life applications. This is due to significant challenges arising from the high strain-induced limitations on the structure design of the device, the materials used and the difficulty of controlling the stretch-release process. Here we have developed a laser-programmable buckling process to overcome these obstacles and realize a highly stretchable organic light-emitting diode with unprecedented efficiency and mechanical robustness. The strained device luminous efficiency −70 cd A⁻¹ under 70% strain - is the largest to date and the device can accommodate 100% strain while exhibiting only small fluctuations in performance over 15,000 stretch-release cycles. This work paves the way towards fully stretchable organic light-emitting diodes that can be used in wearable electronic devices.

Transparent conductive electrodes, as transmission windows of photons and electrons, play important roles in high‐performance organic optoelectronic devices. The replacement of widely used indium tin oxide (ITO) electrodes has been attempted due to the increasing cost and intrinsically brittle characteristics of ITO. Ultrathin metal films, with excellent optoelectrical features, high flexibility, and sufficient mechanical stability, have been considered a potential candidate for the use as transparent conductive electrodes. However, ultrathin metal films follow the Volmer–Weber mechanism, resulting in a rough and discontinuous morphology with poor optoelectrical properties due to the bad adhesion to substrates. This review summarizes the progress in strategies for preparing ultrathin and ultrasmooth metal films with superior transmittance and conductivity by successfully suppressing the Volmer–Weber mechanism. The electrical and optical performances of the ultrathin metal films based on improved nucleation processes, as well as applications in ITO‐free organic optoelectronic devices, are also described and discussed in detail.

Perovskite QDs are promising platforms for light-emitting applications. Advances in perovskite QDs, including optoelectronic properties and device performance are discussed.

As the demand for display technology in consumer electronics and lighting panels increases, thin, light, high‐quality, and more cost‐effective light‐emitting devices are required. Organic light‐emitting devices (OLEDs), satisfying the criteria exactly, have been considered the most promising next‐generation display and lighting technique. In particular, an OLED based on flexible substrate enables the device to be applied to curved displays, electronic newspapers, wearable displays, and conceptual lighting panels, has been always in the spotlight both in science and industry. Great advances on flexible OLEDs (FOLEDs) have been made over the past three decades. The fundamental elements of FOLEDs including substrates, electrodes, fabrication and encapsulation techniques, as well as the strategies of efficiency improvement are discussed herein. Moreover, emerging electrodes such as graphene, carbon nanotubes, metal nanowire network and their composite, flexible perovskite light emitting devices, and stretchable light emitting devices are also considered. Finally, the future challenges and prospects for these devices are put forward.

Stretchable electronic and optoelectronic devices based on controllable ordered buckling structures exhibit superior mechanical stability by retaining their buckling profile without distortion in repeated stretch-release cycles. However, a simple and universal technology to introduce ordered buckling structures into stretchable devices remains a real challenge. Here, a simple and general stencil-pattern transferring technology was applied to stretchable organic light-emitting devices (SOLEDs) and polymer solar cells (SPSCs) to realize an ordered buckling profile. To the best of our knowledge, both the SOLEDs and SPSCs with periodic buckles exhibited the highest mechanical robustness by operating with small performance variations after 20,000 and 12,000 stretch-release cycles between 0% and 20% tensile strain, respectively. Notably, in this work, periodic-buckled structures were introduced into SPSCs for the first time, with the number of stretch-release cycles for the SPSCs improved by two orders of magnitude compared to that for previously reported random-buckled stretchable organic solar cells. The simple method used in this work provides a universal solution for low-cost and high-performance stretchable electronic and optoelectronic devices and promotes the commercial development of stretchable devices in wearable electronics.