An Amorphous n-Type Conjugated Polymer with an Ultra-Rigid Planar Backbone

High charge carrier mobility polymer semiconductors are always semi-crystalline. Amorphous conjugated polymers represent another kind of polymer semiconductors with different charge transporting mechanism. Here we report the first near-amorphous n-type conjugated polymer with decent electron mobility, which features a remarkably rigid, straight and planar polymer backbone. The molecular design strategy is to copolymerize two fused-ring building blocks which are both electron-accepting, centrosymmetrical and planar. The polymer is the alternating copolymer of double B <- N bridged bipyridine (BNBP) unit and benzobisthiazole (BBTz) unit. It shows a decent electron mobility of 0.34 cm(2) V-1 s(-1) in organic field-effect transistors. The excellent electron transporting property of the polymer is possibly due to the ultrahigh backbone stiffness, small pi-pi stacking distance, and high molecular weight.