Designing high performance conjugated materials for photovoltaic cells with the aid of intramolecular noncovalent interactions.

Organic semiconductors including conjugated polymers and small molecules can be applied in many fields due to their unique advantages, such as light weight, solution processability, easy functionalization etc. During the past ten years, we mainly focused on the design and synthesis of conjugated polymer donor materials and small molecular acceptor materials for organic solar cells and hole transport materials for perovskite solar cells. To obtain planar conjugated polymers, low cost small molecular acceptors, and dopant-free hole transport polymers, we adopted intramolecular noncovalent interactions (INCIs) as the design strategy. In this brief review, we will demonstrate that the INCI strategy is very efficient in the design of high performance photovoltaic materials.