Due to the high value of its dielectric constant, polyimide does not meet the requirements of the development of integrated circuits and high-frequency printed circuits. The development of novel low dielectric constant polyimide materials for the preparation of flexible copper clad laminates is of theoretical and practical significance in the application of polyimide for 5G communications. In this work, different fluorinated graphene/polyamic acids (FG/PAA) were used as the precursor, and the porous polyimide film was successfully prepared by phase inversion. The dielectric constant of the porous polyimide film is relatively low, being less than 1.7. When the content of fluorinated graphene is 0.5 wt%, the overall dielectric performance of the porous film is the best, with a dielectric constant of 1.56 (10 kHz) and a characteristic breakdown field strength of 56.39 kV/mm. In addition, the mechanical properties of the film are relatively poor, with tensile strengths of 13.87 MPa (0.2 wt%), 13.61 MPa (0.5 wt%), and 6.25 MPa (1.0 wt%), respectively. Therefore, further improving the breakdown resistance and mechanical properties of the porous film is essential for the application of porous ultra-low dielectric polyimide materials.

Several kinds of polyimide (PI) films stemmed out of 4, 4’–diaminodiphenyl ether, as well as various structurally various aromatic dianhydride, were prepared. The films’ mechanical, dielectric, and dynamic mechanical attributes were put under investigation. According the findings, the PI films’ performance is significantly different as a result of their diverse structure. PI’s dielectric constant and dielectric loss tangent of abides by the increasing order below: PMDA-PI>BTDA-PI>BPDA-PI. Moreover, the electric breakdown strength of BTDA-PI (478.90 kV/mm) presents a lot higher value compared to the one PMDA-PI (326.80 kV/mm) and BPDA-PI (357.07 kV/mm). In particular, BTDA-PI film possesses high electric breakdown strength about 478.90 kV/mm. In addition, PI’s glass transition temperature (T_g) are, respectively, 276 °C (BTDA-PI), and 290 °C (BPDA-PI), as well as 302 °C (PMDA-PI). Therefore, in virtue of their various structures and performances, practical applications of PI films can exert significant role in the electronics and microelectronics industries.

Photonic crystal (PC) thin films that are self-assembled from different-sized silica microspheres were prepared for studying mechanical properties via nanoindentation at the submicron scale. We found that the silica photonic crystals (PCs) possessed a face-centered cubic (FCC) microstructure and their elastic modulus and hardness were in the range of ~1.81–4.92 GPa and 0.008–0.033 GPa, respectively. The calculated results proved that there were size-dependent properties in the silica PCs, in that the elastic modulus and hardness increased as the diameter decreased from 538 nm to 326 nm. After studying the total work and plastic work in the progressive deformation of silica PCs during the nanoindentation tests, we developed a two-stage deformation model to explain how the microsphere size affects the mechanical properties of PC thin films. The phenomenon of “smaller is stronger” is mainly due to the energy consumption, which combines the effects of microstructure collapse, microsphere slide, and reduced porosity during the whole loading and unloading process. In addition, the results of numerical simulation matched the experimental data and reflected the energy change rules of PCs during the indentation process. Furthermore, the study affords useful guidance for constructing high-performance films with proper design and potential application in next-generation PC materials.