In order to develop high charge carrier mobility in semiconducting conjugated polymers, the design of these polymers tend to struggle between antithetical requirements which are having rigid and planar backbone and keeping good solubility in common organic solvents. One unique strategy to address this issue is the incorporation of polymer side chain which dramatically enhances the solubility of otherwise poor or insoluble conjugated polymers, whilst maintaining good charge carrier transport. The main issue of incorporating PS side chain was the limited synthetic accessibility to various conjugated building blocks. Accordingly, in this work, we have developed a versatile synthetic approach to efficiently attach polymer side chain onto conjugated backbones by utilizing termination process of living anionic polymerization. With this strategy, we have successfully attached various amount (0 to 20%) of precisely-controlled molecular weight with narrow polydispersity PS side chain onto naphthalenediimide-bithiophene conjugated backbone. The field-effect transistor measurement of the semiconducting polymers with various amount of side chain showed exact same electron mobilities as high as 0.24 cm2V-1s-1, despite having up to 20% of attached PS side chain. Importantly, we observed a striking impact of the attached PS side chain on the air stability of the attached semiconducting conjugated polymer.

Impact of polystyrene oligomer side-chain on n-type polymer semiconducting properties for organic field-effect transistor

251st National Meeting (2016)

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