Silicon and oxygen synergistic effects for the discovery of new high-performance nonfullerene acceptors

In organic electronics, an aromatic fused ring is a basic unit that provides π-electrons to construct semiconductors and governs the device performance. The main challenge in developing new π-skeletons for tuning the material properties is the limitation of the available chemical approach. Herein, we successfully synthesize two pentacyclic siloxy-bridged π-conjugated isomers to investigate the synergistic effects of Si and O atoms on the geometric and electronic influence of π-units in organic electronics. Notably, the synthesis routes for both isomers possess several advantages over the previous approaches for delivering conventional aromatic fused-rings, such as environmentally benign tin-free synthesis and few synthetic steps. To explore their potential application as photovoltaic materials, two isomeric acceptor–donor–acceptor type acceptors based on these two isomers were developed, showing a decent device efficiency of 10%, which indicates the great potential of this SiO-bridged ladder-type unit for the development of new high-performance semiconductor materials.