Incorporation of hydrogen-bonding units into polymeric semiconductors toward boosting charge mobility, intrinsic stretchability, and self-healing ability

The soft nature has endowed conjugated polymers with promising applications in a wide range of field-effect transistor (FET) based flexible electronics. With unremitting efforts on revealing the molecular structure-property relationships, numerous novel conjugated polymers with high mobility and excellent mechanical property have been developed in the past decades. Incorporating hydrogen-bonding (H-bonding) units into semiconducting polymers is one of the most successful strategies for designing high-performance semiconducting materials. In this review, we aim to highlight the roles of H-bonding units in the performances of polymeric FETs from three aspects. These include (i) charge mobility enhancement for semiconducting polymers after incorporation of H-bonding units into the side chains, (ii) the effects of H-bonding units on the stretchability of conjugated polymers, and (iii) the improvement of self-healing properties of conjugated polymers containing dynamic hydrogen bonds due to the H-bonding units in the side chains or conjugated backbones.