Direct arylation of heteroaromatic compounds with congested, functionalised aryl bromides at low palladium/triphosphane catalyst loading.

A new ferrocenyl triphosphane ligand associated to palladium was found to be an efficient catalyst for the direct coupling of highly congested, functionalised aryl bromides with a variety of heteroarenes. These coupling reactions can generally be performed by using a low-loading (0.1-0.5 mol%) of the catalyst. The present protocol tolerates important and useful functional groups, which allows for further elaboration into more sophisticated heterocyclic molecules. The straightforward arylation of heteroaromatic compounds with congested ortho-substituted aryl bromides may permit further convergent syntheses of diverse ligands, biologically active molecules and molecular materials in only a few steps.