Organic solar cells
are on the dawn of the next era. The change
of focus toward non-fullerene acceptors has introduced an enormous
amount of organic n-type materials and has drastically increased the
power conversion efficiencies of organic photovoltaics, now exceeding
18%, a value that was believed to be unreachable some years ago. In
this Review, we summarize the recent progress in the design of ladder-type
fused-ring non-fullerene acceptors in the years 2018–2020.
We thereby concentrate on single layer heterojunction solar cells
and omit tandem architectures as well as ternary solar cells. By analyzing
more than 700 structures, we highlight the basic design principles
and their influence on the optical and electrical structure of the
acceptor molecules and review their photovoltaic performance obtained
so far. This Review should give an extensive overview of the plenitude
of acceptor motifs but will also help to understand which structures
and strategies are beneficial for designing materials for highly efficient
non-fullerene organic solar cells.
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