DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY

Exerpt:  "COFs’ combination of high thermal conductivity and electrical insulation makes them attractive for semiconductor applications. ‘It’s generally very hard to design materials with both of those properties,’ says William Dichtel, a porous polymer expert at Northwestern University in Illinois, US. For microprocessors to keep shrinking, better performing materials with these dual properties are needed. ‘We have a big heat dissipation problem in chips, yet we also need low dielectric constant materials, as we don’t want the electric field of one wire to have too much influence on the electronics of an adjacent wire,’ he adds. In 2021, Dichtel and colleagues reported a boronate ester-linked COF thin film with a combination of high thermal conductivity and a low dielectric-constant suitable for using in next generation integrated circuit components. Among other applications being explored for COFs are targeted drug delivery and as fluorescence-based sensors able to detect a broad range of analytes."