High-mobility polymeric semiconductors

As an important part of organic field-effect transistors (OFETs), organic semiconductor plays an important role on the device performance. Compared with organic small semiconductors, polymeric semiconductors possess better solution processability and room-temperature-manufacturing ability, which make them be widely investigated. Since 1970s, significant advances have been achieved both on the development of high-mobility polymer semiconductors and construction of high-performance polymer FETs (PFETs). To date, the field-effect mobility of PFETs has been significantly increased from the initial value of 10 –5 cm 2 V –1 s –1 to the state-of-art value of 36.3 cm 2 V –1 s –1 due to the both advances of developing high-performing polymeric semiconductors and optimizing device fabrication. Therefore, there have accumulated rich experience on molecular design for high-mobility polymer semiconductors and new insights of understanding charge transport physics have also been gained from the experiment. With molecular design as the entry point, this review systematically summarizes the recent progresses on polymeric semiconductors, including p-type, n-type and ambipolar semiconductors, then try to briefly analyze the nature of charge transport in polymeric semiconductors and the corresponding optimization processes for high performance PFETs, hopefully providing valuable guideline for the further scientific works in this field.