With the development of materials science and device technology, stretchable components and flexible displays have attracted attention due to their potential applications in the next generation of wearable and implantable electronic devices. Polymer semiconductor materials with adjustable monomer structure, regional molecular synergy, intrinsic flexibility, and other characteristics play an important role and gradually become one of the important components for achieving multifunctional applications. In particular, the molecular design and development of multifunctional integrated polymer semiconductors with unique optical, electrical, mechanical, and chemical properties are crucial for advanced and emerging manufacturing technologies. One of the important challenges in the field of organic semiconductors is to achieve multifunctional applications through multi-level manufacturing.
In the early stage, the Liu Yunqi research group of the Key Laboratory of the Institute of Mechanical and Solid State of the Chemical Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made a series of progress in the research of high mobility polymer semiconductor materials.
Recently, the research group has developed a molecular design method for a novel multifunctional polymer semiconductor that integrates cost, stretchability, high mobility, and strong luminescence. This study optimized the construction units containing pyridine [1,2,3] triazole thiophene structure, resulting in a series of regionally ordered quaternary polymers with full skeleton coplanarity and coupling reaction selectivity. Research has shown that regionally ordered conjugated skeletons contribute to the tight packing of polymer molecular chains. Dynamic mechanical testing, thin film elastomer testing, and two-dimensional grazing incidence wide-angle X-ray diffraction experiments show that multifunctional integrated quaternary polymer semiconductors have lower elastic modulus, over 100% crack initiation strain, excellent crystallinity, and uniformly distributed short-range ordered aggregates. A top gate bottom contact OFET device was prepared using glass as a substrate to investigate its electrical performance. The test results indicate that polymer semiconductors have high mobility. In addition, the study prepared fully stretchable OFET devices using polydimethylsiloxane as a substrate, demonstrating the stretchability of the material and the efficient carrier transport and high mechanical reversibility exhibited by polymer semiconductors. To further improve the luminescent performance of polymers and effectively maintain their initial mechanical and electrical properties, a homologous blending strategy has been proposed for the first time. Blended materials exhibit excellent mobility and quantum yield. This work integrates excellent optical, electrical, and mechanical properties into the same molecular system, promoting the development of multifunctional polymer semiconductors.
The relevant research results were published in Advanced Materials and selected as the insert for this issue. The research work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Key R&D Program and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Paper link：
论文链接
Design diagram of a multifunctional polymer semiconductor integrating intrinsic stretchability, high mobility, and strong luminescence
