Since the first report of aggregation-induced emission (AIE) concept in 2001, it has received intense attentions from academy and industry because of its important applications in diverse research fronts. Up to now, the luminogens with AIE property (AIEgens) have been widely used in optoelectronic devices, fluorescent bioprobes and chemosensors, and researchers have also committed to exploring the potentials of AIEgens in other cross-cutting areas. The AIEgens have shown superior advantages such as highly efficient emissions in the aggregated state and thus exhibited better performances in comparison with traditional luminescent materials whose emissions are usually quenched upon aggregate formation. In view of the significant achievements of AIEgens in recent years, this review presents representative advancements of AIEgens for the applications in organic optoelectronic devices, mainly including organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) devices, electrofluorochromic (EFC) devices, luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs), and liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Not only the design strategies of AIEgens for these optoelectronic devices are analyzed, but also their structure-property relationship and working mechanism are elucidated. It is foreseeable that robust AIEgens with specific functionalities will find more and more applications in various research fields and play an increasingly important role in high-tech devices.

By melting tetraphenylethene (TPE) and 1,2,4,5-tetraphenyl-1H-imidazole (TPI) units together through different linking positions, three new fluorophores are synthesized, and their optical, electronic and electroluminescence (EL) properties are fully studied. Owing to the presence of TPE unit(s), these fluorophores are weak emitters in solutions, but are induced to emit strongly in the aggregated state, presenting typical aggregation-induced emission characteristics. The experimental and computational results reveal that different connection patterns between TPE and TPI could impact the molecular conjugation greatly, leading to varied emission wavelength, fluorescence quantum yield and EL performance in organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). The fluorophore built by attaching TPE unit to the 1-position of imidazole ring shows bluest fluorescence, and its EL device emits at deep blue region (445 nm; CIE = (0.16, 0.15)). And the device based on the fluorophore by linking TPE to the 2- position of imidazole ring shows EL at 467 nm (CIE = (0.17, 0.22)) with good efficiencies of 3.17 cd·A–1, and 1.77%.