The Compositional Spread Approach to high Dielectric Constant Materials and Materials fro Integrated Optics

This ia an invited chapter for an American Chemical Society volume based on a symposium entitled Combinatorial Approaches to Materials Development, Ripudaman Malhotra, SRI International, ed.,. New high throughput synthetic approaches combined with rapid screening techniques offer important advantages for materials investigations. This chapter focuses on a thin film-based approach we call the continuous compositional spread, CCS, approach. We discuss the use of this approach in the discovery of a new amorphous high dielectric constant, high breakdown field, low-leakage material of approximate composition, Zr sub (.2) Sn sub (.2) Ti sub (.6) O sub x, a-ZTT. We also discuss the use of this approach for investigations of new materials for planar waveguide devices for use in DWM systems.