Polymer-assisted conformal coating of TiO2 thin films

Conformal coating of nanofabricated structures with a high-index dielectric material is a common problem for a diverse set of integrated photonic and plasmonic devices such as planar waveguides, on-chip spectrometers, gratings, flat panel displays, optical sensors, and integrated optical devices. In this paper we were recently able to demonstrate an alternate method for conformally coating photonic nanostructures using a low cost, polymer-assisted deposition (PAD) process for the metal-oxide TiO2. In a PAD process a thermally curable, hybrid high refractive index polymer solution is spin-coated onto a substrate. The polymer controls the viscosity and binds the metal ions, resulting in a homogeneous distribution of the precursor in solution. When cured at elevated temperature, the hybrid polymer coating decomposes to form a metal oxide-rich film that has a high refractive index that conformally fills the voids in nanofabricated structures. The resulting films have refractive indices higher than 1.83 in the...