The need for decreasing semiconductor device critical dimensions at feature sizes below the 20 nm resolution limit has led the semiconductor industry to adopt extreme ultra violet (EUV) lithography with exposure at 13.5 nm as the main next generation lithographic technology. The broad consensus on this direction has triggered a dramatic increase of interest on resist materials of high sensitivity especially designed for use in the EUV spectral region in order to meet the strict requirements needed for overcoming the source brightness issues and securing the cost efficiency of the technology. To this direction both fundamental studies on the radiation induced chemistry in this spectral area and a plethora of new ideas targeting at the design of new highly sensitive and top performing resists have been proposed. Besides the traditional areas of acid-catalyzed chemically amplified resists and the resists based on polymer backbone breaking new unconventional ideas have been proposed based on the insertion of metal compounds or compounds of other highly absorbing at EUV atoms in the resist formulations. These last developments are reviewed here. Since the effort targets to a new understanding of electron-induced chemical reactions that dominate the resist performance in this region these last developments may lead to unprecedented changes in lithographic technology but can also strongly affect other scientific areas where electron-induced chemistry plays a critical role.

Here we review the recent strategies for developing organic and inorganic molecular materials for application as electron and hole transport layers and as additives to achieve high efficiency and stability perovskite solar cells.

In this work a hydrogenated under-stoichiometric tungsten oxide is introduced as an efficient anode interlayer in organic photovoltaics (OPVs). The benefits of hydrogen incorporation into the oxide lattice for obtaining desirable properties of tungsten oxides are explored. These benefits include the occupation of gap states near the Fermi level, which may facilitate charge transport, and the maintenance of a high work function, nearly similar to that of the stoichiometric tungsten oxide, which contributes to the formation of a large interfacial dipole at the anode interface and enhances charge extraction. A large improvement was achieved in the operational characteristics – especially in the open-circuit voltage – of bulk heterojunction solar cells based on different polymeric donors, namely poly(3-hexylthiophene), P3HT, or poly[(9-(1-octylnonyl)-9H-carbazole-2,7-diyl)-2,5-thiophenediyl-2,1,3-benzothiadiazole-4,7-diyl-2,5-thiophenediyl], PCDTBT, and the fullerene acceptor [6,6]-phenyl-C₇₁ butyric acid methyl ester, PC₇₁BM, that incorporated a hydrogenated tungsten oxide as an anode interlayer. This improvement was correlated with the devices' incident photon-to-electron conversion efficiencies (IPCEs) and impedance measurements. Furthermore, an increase in both the device's flat-band voltage (V_fb) and the doping level of the organic semiconductor was measured in P3HT:PC₇₁BM based devices by Mott–Schottky capacitance analysis. Additional benefits are the large process window established for the devices incorporating the hydrogenated tungsten oxide as an anode interlayer and the maintenance of a high PCE (>80% of its initial efficiency) over 50 days, demonstrating good long-term stability, which is much better than that of the conventional devices based on PEDOT:PSS. The results suggest that the interface engineering with hydrogen-treated metal oxide interlayers is an important strategy to develop highly performing and stable organic photovoltaics.