The semiconductor technology based on inorganic semiconductors has dramatically accelerated the development of economy, health, information and energy in our modern life. In contrast, the discovery of conducting polymers in the late 1970s opened a new way for semiconductor technology (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2000). In comparison to their inorganic counterparts, organic semiconductors exhibit obvious advantages such as low cost, light weight, mechanical flexibility, compatibility with plastic substrates, and mass production of large-area electronic devices. Due to their unique electrical properties, organic semiconductors hold a great potential in applications of organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) and organic photovoltaics (OPVs). In particular, several European multinational corporations (e.g. Philips, BASF, Siemens) and spin-off companies (e.g. CDT, Plastic Logic, Heliatek) are paving the way to a new business.
Considerable achievements have been made for conjugated polymers, but so far it is still a great challenge to tune the microstructure of semiconducting polymers in a controllable way, which allows us to further improve the device performance for both OFETs and OPVs and to deeply understand the mechanism of charge carrier transport in organic electronics.
The primary objective of this project is using solution processing to efficiently realize the controllable growth of fibrillar microstructure such as fiber size and orientation for the exactly same polymer(s), to systematically investigate the impact of their microstructure on charge carrier transport in both OFETs and OPVs (multidisciplinary), and finally to reveal the intrinsic mechanism of charge carrier transport in semiconducting polymers (interdisciplinary).
