Design and Synthesis Aspects of Soluble Organic Semiconductors
John Anthony, University of Kentucky
Short abstract: By careful functionalization, planar organic semiconductors can
be influenced to adopt a variety of intermolecular orientations in the solid state.
Pi-stacking in 1-, 2-, and 3-dimensions, as well as a variety of herringbone
orientations can be obtained by careful selection of the functional group, and the
influence of packing on stability, film forming ability and device performance will
be discussed. A common driving force for semiconductor functionalization is to
improve solubility. Where the added groups lead to extremely high solubility, the
ability to purify the resulting material by sublimation is typically severely
diminished. In this case, careful purification of the starting materials and
optimization of reaction conditions is critical to the preparation of materials pure
enough for device uses or for the formation of high-purity single crystals, and
some of our progress in the optimization our synthetic approaches to organic
semiconductors will be presented.