Harnessing Compositional Gradients to Elucidate Phase Behaviors toward High Performance Polymer Semiconductor Blends.

Polymer semiconductor/insulator blends offer a promising avenue to achieve desired mechanical properties, environmental stability, and high device performance in organic field-effect transistors. A comprehensive understanding of process-structure-property relationships necessitates a thorough exploration of the composition space to identify transitions in performance, morphology, and phase behavior. Hence, this study employs a high-throughput gradient thin film library, enabling rapid and continuous screening of composition-morphology-device performance relationships in conjugated polymer blends.

Chain Conformation and Exciton Delocalization in a Push-Pull Conjugated Polymer.

Linear and nonlinear optical line shapes reveal details of excitonic structure in polymer semiconductors. We implement absorption, photoluminescence, and transient absorption spectroscopies in DPP-DTT, an electron push-pull copolymer, to explore the relationship between their spectral line shapes and chain conformation, deduced from resonance Raman spectroscopy and from calculations. The viscosity of precursor polymer solutions before film casting displays a transition that suggests gel formation above a critical concentration.

Conjugated Polymer Process Ontology and Experimental Data Repository for Organic Field-Effect Transistors.

Polymer-based semiconductors and organic electronics encapsulate a significant research thrust for informatics-driven materials development. However, device measurements are described by a complex array of design and parameter choices, many of which are sparsely reported. For example, the mobility of a polymer-based organic field-effect transistor (OFET) may vary by several orders of magnitude for a given polymer as a plethora of parameters related to solution processing, interface design/surface treatment, thin-film deposition, postprocessing, and measurement settings have a profound effect on the value of the final measurement.

The Solution is the Solution: Data-Driven Elucidation of Solution-to-Device Feature Transfer for π-Conjugated Polymer Semiconductors.

The advent of data analytics techniques and materials informatics provides opportunities to accelerate the discovery and development of organic semiconductors for electronic devices. However, the development of engineering solutions is limited by the ability to control thin-film morphology in an immense parameter space. The combination of high-throughput experimentation (HTE) laboratory techniques and data analytics offers tremendous avenues to traverse the expansive domains of tunable variables offered by organic semiconductor thin films.