Advances in organic field-effect transistors based on metal–organic coordination materials and applications

Organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) not only act as the ideal platforms for the investigation of charge transport properties of organic semiconductor materials, but also represent the basic units of integrated circuits in flexible and wearable electronic devices. Because of a better understanding of the structure–property relationship of organic semiconductor materials, considerable advancement has been achieved in this field over the past few decades. Among them, metal–organic coordination materials, mainly including discrete metal complexes, coordination polymers and frameworks, have been employed to obtain high-performance OFETs due to their distinct features, such as wide structural diversities, finely tuned HOMO and LUMO energies achieved using different metals and ligands, and metal/ligand-involved pathways for the modulation of charge transport. Herein, the recent development of OFETs based on metal–organic coordination materials and related applications are reviewed. Representative high-performance semiconducting metal–organic coordination materials are systematically summarized into four categories: metal porphyrins and metal phthalocyanines, metal dithiolene/diamine and polypyridine metal complexes, coordination polymers, and metal–organic coordination frameworks. The applications of these transistor devices in organic light-emitting transistors, transistor sensors, photodetectors and memory devices are discussed. Some perspectives and potential guidelines are given in Conclusions for future research studies in this field.