Abstract

In the past decade, significant progress has been made in the fabrication of organic semiconductor thin-film devices predominantly due to important improvements of existing materials and the creation of a wealth of novel compounds. Many challenges, however, still exist. Key to commercial success is to make it technological practice to exploit the touted potential for low-cost manufacturing of these functional materials. This requires intimate knowledge of relevant structure/processing/performance interrelations. Here, examples are given of how polymer processing ‘tools’ may be utilized to gain further understanding of this interesting class of materials and how the physical organization, from the molecular to the macro-scale of functional organic matter such as polymer semiconductors can can be controlled. To this end, we present a survey on the principles of structure development from the liquid phase of this material family with focus on how to manipulate their phase transformations and solid-state order to tailor and tune the final ‘morphology’ towards technological and practical applications.