A breath figure (BF) is the water droplet array that forms when moisture comes in contact with a cold substrate. This water droplet array has been widely utilized in the past two decades as a versatile soft template for the fabrication of polymeric porous films. Accordingly, the ordered pores on the polymer films formed with such a method are named a breath figure array (BFA).The BF templating technique is undergoing rapid development. Several unconventional BF processes have been established to prepare porous films with unique morphologies or primary materials, and various newly developed functionalization techniques have significantly improved the performance of polymeric films with BFA, leading to novel applications, including templates, biosensors, and separation membranes. These recent achievements will be described in this Minireview.

Here, we show a facile and versatile method to prepare highly ordered inorganic patterns on solid substrates by pyrolyzing UV cross-linked polymer/functional precursor hybrid films. The crosslinked polymer matrix acted as structure-directing agent in a pyrolyzing process, whereas the functional precursor was converted into the skeleton of the micropatterns. The inorganic micropatterns could be further catalytically functionalized to grow CNT and ZnO nanorod arrays by simply changing different functional precursors. This simple technique offers new prospects in the field of micropatterns, nanolithography, and template.