n-type rigid semiconducting polymers bearing oligo(ethylene glycol) side chains for high-performance organic electrochemical transistors

Journal article

N-type conjugated polymers as the semiconducting component of organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) are still undeveloped with respect to their p-type counterparts. Herein, we report two rigid n-type conjugated polymers bearing oligo(ethylene glycol) (OEG) side chains, PgNaN and PgNgN, which demonstrated an essentially torsion-free π-conjugated backbone. The planarity and electron-deficient rigid structures enable the resulting polymers to achieve high electron mobility in an OECT device of up to the 10^-3  cm²  V^-1  s^-1 range, with a deep-lying LUMO energy level lower than -4.0 eV. Prominently, the polymers exhibited a high device performance with a maximum dimensionally normalized transconductance of 0.212 S cm^-1 and the product of charge-carrier mobility μ and volumetric capacitance C* of 0.662±0.113 F cm^-1  V^-1  s^-1 , which are among the highest in n-type conjugated polymers reported to date. Moreover, the polymers are synthesized via a metal-free aldol-condensation polymerization, which is beneficial to their application in bioelectronics.

Authors: Chen, X; Marks, A; Paulsen, BD; Wu, R; Rashid, RB

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: Angewandte Chemie International Edition
• Volume: 60
• Issue: 17
• Pages: 9368-9373
• Place of publication: Germany
• Publication date: 2021-03-12
• Acceptance date: 2020-12-24
• DOI: 10.1002/anie.202013998
• EISSN: 1521-3773
• ISSN: 1433-7851
• Pmid: 33368944
• Language: English
• Keywords: organic electrochemical transistors; oligo(ethylene glycol) side chains; FFR; n-type conjugated polymers; metal-free aldol condensation; rigid semiconducting polymers