Cubic Silsesquioxanes as Tunable High Performance Coating Materials

Published

June 19, 2013

Author(s)

Christopher Soles, Hyun W. Ro, Aaron Forster, Dave J. Krug, Vera Popova, Richard M. Laine

Abstract

In this manuscript a series of cubic silsequioxane monomers with their eight vertices functionalized with different organic ligands terminated with triethoxysilane groups were acid hydrolyzed, spin cast into thin films, and then vitrified into hard organosilicate films. Both the length of the organic ligands and the number of triethoxysilane groups were varied to change the degree of cross-linking and cubic silsequioxane content of the vitrified films. This resulted in a series of high quality optical coatings with excellent properties characterized in terms of their porosity, density, coefficient of thermal expansion, modulus, hardness, and surface energy. In general, higher concentrations of the cubic silsequioxane moiety in the network and higher cross-link densities led to enhanced mechanical properties, lower porosity, higher density, lower thermal expansion, and a very hydrophilic surface. The manner by which these properties can be tuned via the cubic silsesquioxane content is discussed in the comparison to the structure-property relations for other spin on silsequioxane type films.

Citation

Applied Organometallic Chemistry

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1002/aoc.3032

Local Download

Keywords

thin film, organosilicate, low k dielectric, porous materials, coatings, X-ray refelctivity, X-ray porosimetry

Citation

Soles, C. , Ro, H. , Forster, A. , Krug, D. , Popova, V. and Laine, R. (2013), Cubic Silsesquioxanes as Tunable High Performance Coating Materials, Applied Organometallic Chemistry, [online], https://doi.org/10.1002/aoc.3032, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=913491 (Accessed October 14, 2025)