Facile and very large area fabrication of highly oriented semiconducting polymer thin films for anisotropic organic electronic devices

Fabrication of large area and uniform thin films with preferred edge-on orientation is highly demanded for flexible organic electronic devices. In this work, utilization of a newly designed slider in the floating film transfer method to assist unidirectional film spreading led to the fabrication of uniform and macroscopically edge-on oriented ribbon-shaped floating films (15cm × 2cm) having very large optical anisotropy (>20). The results pertaining to the in-plane grazing angle incident X-ray diffraction (GIXD) and φ-scan measurements revealed the well-stacked polymer backbone conformation with edge-on orientation without any inter-mixing of face-on oriented counterparts. Optical anisotropy dependent charge transport in organic field effect transistors using anisotropic poly(3,3-didodecyl-quaterthiophene) films has also been shown, and the results are supported by polarized electronic absorption and GIXD measurements