Difluoroenoxysilanes, interesting fluorinated silyl enol ethers, could be easily obtained by the reaction of Mg-mediated C-F bond cleavage of trifluoromethyl ketones, and have been recognized as versatile building blocks for the construction of diverse
α,
α-difluoroketone-containing molecules [
10,
11]. Generally, the reactions of difluoroenoxysilanes mainly involve nucleophilic addition to unsaturated precursors such as aldehydes, ketones, imines and olefins [
12-
16], nucleophilic substitution of alkyl halides, alcohols or substrates with other leaving groups [
17-
19], halogenations [
20], oxidative coupling [
21] and rearrangement reactions [
22] lead to numerous
α,
α-difluoroketone derivatives (
Scheme 1b). In spite of elegant achievements, difluoroenoxysilanes usually act as C1 synthons to participate the rapid construction of functionalized
α,
α-difluoroketones in these reported reaction patterns. Therefore, it is highly desirable to develop new transformation models of difluoroenoxysilanes from the view of expanding the structural diversity of the designed molecules. In order to realize the highly efficient construction of multiply functionalized difluorinated chromans, we envisaged that the generated difluoroketone carbonyl group could be further utilized as an electrophilic site to facilitate the subsequent transformations to forge difluorinated cyclic compounds despite its being rarely explored possibly due to the low reactivity in previous studies [
10,
11]. Correspondingly, difluoroenoxysilanes serve as C2 synthons in constructing CF
2-engineered chromans for this new reaction pattern. Concerning the excellent performance of
ortho-hydroxyphenyl
para-quinone methides (
p-QMs) in cyclization reactions for synthesizing chroman derivatives [
23-
29] and our continued interest in developing new catalytic routes to fluorine-containing molecules [
16,
18,
19,
22], we herein reported a HFIP-catalyzed highly diastereoselective synthesis of difluorinated multisubstituted chromans
via the formal [4 + 2] cyclization of
ortho-hydroxyphenyl
p-QMs with difluoroenoxysilanes (
Scheme 1c). By taking advantage of this scheduled procedure, a series of highly functionalized difluorinated chromans were efficiently prepared in high diastereoselectivities.