The History of Palladium-Catalyzed Cross-Couplings Should Inspire the Future of Catalyst-Transfer Polymerization

Conjugated polymers are the workhorse materials in organic electronics, a field that is rapidly growing to encompass energy storage devices such as supercapacitors and batteries. The highest-performing materials today have incredibly diverse structures and are accessed via step-growth polymerizations. This method results in limited control over the polymer's molecular weight, sequence, and dispersity, all of which can significantly impact device performance. The discovery of catalyst-transfer polymerization (CTP) in 2004 was predicted to change this landscape. Instead, nearly 14 years later, the CTP scope remains mostly limited to polymerizing small, electron-rich monomers. There is a pronounced gap between the rich array of structures utilized in organic electronics and what can be polymerized in a living, chain-growth fashion via CTP. Here, we suggest that palladium precatalysts could bridge this gap based on their huge versatility in the small molecule cross-coupling literature. We highlight specific ancillary ligands from the small-molecule literature that we anticipate are candidates for enabling diverse conjugated polymer syntheses based on nearly a decade of research into the CTP mechanism. In addition, we describe several recent promising examples of CTP mediated by Pd precatalysts that serve as inspiration for the future. We present this Perspective as a call-to-action to advance organic electronics with CTP.