Research progress in donor-acceptor copolymers field-effect transistors

Abstract

Significant progress has been made in organic field-effect transistors (OFETs)since 1980s. Up to now, hundreds of organic semiconductors used for OFETs have been synthesized. After 30 years of development, the device performance of polymer FETs has been significantly improved, and the mobility has been improved from 10-6~10-5 cm2•V-1•s-1 to 12 cm2•V-1•s-1, surpassing that of amorphous silicon (α-Si) FETs (0.1~1 cm2•V-1•s-1). Note that most of the high-performance polymer FET materials are based on donor-acceptor (D-A) copolymers, which are generally synthesized by the copolymerization between two monomers (donor and acceptor). D-A copolymers have been heralded as the third generation of semiconductor materials, due to their considerable contribution to the fast development of conjugated polymers. In this review, recent studies in D-A copolymer FET materials are summarized from the perspective of design, synthesis, and device performance. Different types of polymer FETs including p-type, ambipolar, and n-type FETs based on D-A copolymers were compared and summarized respectively. It is anticipated to penetrate more deeply the basic relationships among the chemical structure-packing structure-property, which could provide valuable information for the future materials exploitation.