Recent progress in all-small-molecule organic photovoltaics

Abstract

Solution-processed organic photovoltaics (OPVs) have the superiorities of light weight, low cost, easy fabrication, high mechanical flexibility and good semitransparency, enabling great potential in next-generation photovoltaic technology. All-small-molecule OPVs (SMPVs) have great potential in commercial application thanks to the unique merits of small molecule materials with well-defined chemical structures and pre-eminent batch-to-batch replicability. With great efforts on material innovation and device engineering, SMPVs have achieved 17% power conversion efficiency (PCE), which still lags behind that of polymer based OPVs. It is significant to make a comprehensive summary on studies on SMPVs for further performance improvement. In this review, the development of SMPVs can be summarized as small molecular material design and device engineering. Challenges and perspectives on this field are put forward for developing high performance SMPVs. This summary on the typical studies on SMPVs would be instructive for researchers in synthesizing new small molecular materials and fabricating highly efficient SMPVs.