Zahra Rafiee - Department of Chemistry, Yasouj University, Yasouj 75914-353, I. R. Iran.

Polyimides are synthesized by the polycondensation reaction of dianhydride and diamine monomers and are well-known for their strength and high-temperature durability (servicetemperatures can exceed 400 °C). They can be used as interlayer dielectrics in microelectronics applications bysimple spin-coating techniques [1]. The overall goal of this ongoing research is to modify the structure of aromatic polyimides to attain solubility in common organic solventswithout substantially decreasing the rigidity of their backbone [2,3]. Solubility is sought to allow processing in the imideform and, thus, avoid the many problems associated with handling poly(amic acid) (PAA) precursors [4,5]. This is especially important in microelectronic and opticalapplications where the imidization conditions for PAAs used during processing can dramatically affect the final materialproperties [6,7].