Low and ultralow RI materials

The need for high and low refractive index materials for antireflective applications and waveguides continues to grow. Growing demand in data processing for data centers and new computational technologies take advantage of light as the new medium. High and low refractive index materials are needed in silicon photonics, augmented reality, and virtual reality (VR) applications, CMOS image sensors and micro-OLED applications. Designing these materials for spin and dip coatable depositions facilitates process flexibility to optical device manufacturing FABs and similar manufacturing facilities. Materials that are processable as spin-coated films with low refractive index of less than 1.25 are presented. These materials are based on a combination of pore size and material size control approaches. Materials presented in this work are adapted from University of Oslo (UiO-66)–based Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs). A key advantage to this approach is that these films are processable at low temperatures, unlike several porogen-based approaches. This allows for these materials to be processed on plastics.