BN-Anthracene for High-Mobility Organic Optoelectronic Materials through Periphery Engineering

Despite the remarkable synthetic accomplishments in creating diverse polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons with B-N bonds (BN-PAHs), their optoelectronic applications have been less exploited. Herein, we report the achievement of high-mobility organic semiconductors based on existing BN-PAHs through a "periphery engineering" strategy. Tetraphenyl- and diphenyl-substituted BN-anthracenes (TPBNA and DPBNA, respectively) are designed and synthesized. DPBNA exhibits the highest hole mobility of 1.3 cm(2) V-1 s(-1) in organic field-effect transistors, significantly outperforming TPBNA and all the reported BN-PAHs. Remarkably, this is the first BN-PAH with mobility over 1 cm(2 )V(-1) s(-1), which is a benchmark value for practical applications as compared with amorphous silicon. Furthermore, high-performance phototransistors based on DPBNA are also demonstrated, implying the high potential of BN-PAHs for optoelectronic applications when the "periphery engineering" strategy is implemented.