Abstract
As a key component in stretchable electronics, semiconducting polymers have been widely studied. However, it remains challenging to achieve stretchable semiconducting polymers with high mobility and mechanical reversibility against repeated mechanical stress. Here, we report a simple and universal strategy to realize intrinsically stretchable semiconducting polymers with controlled multi-scale ordering to address this challenge. Specifically, incorporating two types of randomly distributed co-monomer units reduces overall crystallinity and longer-range orders while maintaining short-range ordered aggregates. The resulting polymers maintain high mobility while having much improved stretchability and mechanical reversibility compared with the regular polymer structure with only one type of co-monomer units. Interestingly, the crystalline microstructures are mostly retained even under strain, which may contribute to the improved robustness of our stretchable semiconductors. The proposed molecular design concept is observed to improve the mechanical properties of various p- and n-type conjugated polymers, thus showing the general applicability of our approach. Finally, fully stretchable transistors fabricated with our newly designed stretchable semiconductors exhibit the highest and most stable mobility retention capability under repeated strains of 1,000 cycles. Our general molecular engineering strategy offers a rapid way to develop high mobility stretchable semiconducting polymers.
Highlights
As a key component in stretchable electronics, semiconducting polymers have been widely studied
As a key component in electronics, semiconductors that are intrinsically stretchable will allow the fabrication of high-density devices and create more robust products
With UV-Vis/NIR and grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXD) measurements, we found that NDI-8TVT showed the lowest relative degree of crystallinity (rDoC) with wellmaintained short-range ordered aggregates, comparable to that of the two reference polymers (NDI-0TVT and 10TVT) (Fig. 4h, i)
Summary
As a key component in stretchable electronics, semiconducting polymers have been widely studied. It is desired to develop a molecular design strategy that is easy to access, reliable without phase-separation, generally applicable to a variety of known highmobility polymer semiconductors, and offers high stretchability without compromising charge carrier mobility. We report a simple and general molecular design strategy for high-mobility intrinsically stretchable polymer semiconductors to address the above limitations. We hypothesized that the introduction of two different types of fully conjugated comonomers may not significantly affect the short-range aggregation of polymeric chains, whereas the structural randomness of the backbone may hinder the formation of larger crystalline domains, which tend to fracture upon strain[39] This controlled ordering at different length scales may improve stretchability without compromise of charge transport
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call