Optically transparent semiconducting polymer nanonetwork for flexible and transparent electronics

Significance When various electronic appliances used in everyday life become deformable and transparent, they will provide tremendous versatility in the design and use of see-through, smart mobile applications, exceeding the limitations of the best developed conventional silicon technologies, which are available only in rigid, opaque forms. However, even recently discovered innovative semiconducting components have failed to simultaneously achieve such flexibility and transparency. Thus, the existing options still comprise only hard, planar, or opaque materials, and obtaining a “key” material for creating truly flexible and transparent electronics has presented a formidable challenge. We report an effective means of creating a “truly flexible, perfectly transparent” and high-mobility semiconducting material and demonstrate several high-end flexible and transparent applications based on a polymeric semiconductor system. Simultaneously achieving high optical transparency and excellent charge mobility in semiconducting polymers has presented a challenge for the application of these materials in future “flexible” and “transparent” electronics (FTEs). Here, by blending only a small amount (∼15 wt %) of a diketopyrrolopyrrole-based semiconducting polymer (DPP2T) into an inert polystyrene (PS) matrix, we introduce a polymer blend system that demonstrates both high field-effect transistor (FET) mobility and excellent optical transparency that approaches 100%. We discover that in a PS matrix, DPP2T forms a web-like, continuously connected nanonetwork that spreads throughout the thin film and provides highly efficient 2D charge pathways through extended intrachain conjugation. The remarkable physical properties achieved using our approach enable us to develop prototype high-performance FTE devices, including colorless all-polymer FET arrays and fully transparent FET-integrated polymer light-emitting diodes.

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