Some trends in the design of homo- and heterometallic molecular precursors of high-tech oxides

The development of new materials for the technological demands requires chemical routes, in the case of oxides mostly being sol–gel or CVD processing, for their elaboration. Those processes need metallic precursors with a set of ligands that are able to provide suitable properties such as solubility or volatility, clean decomposition pathways, control of stoichiometry for multimetallic arrays, to name but a few. These aspects will be illustrated on some recent examples of non-silicon systems.