Dewetting is a spontaneous phenomenon that occurs when unstable thin liquid films break apart on a non-wettable substrate, driven by unfavorable intermolecular forces at the interface. The Neto group has used dewetting of polymer films extensively in the last decade to generate patterned surfaces for a range of applications, including atmospheric water capture and cell patterning. [16][17][18][19][20][21] Dewetting of metastable thin polymer films (≈100 nm) occurs when the polymer is brought above its glass transition temperature (T g ), by either thermal or solvent annealing, to enable sufficient mobility of the polymer chains. During dewetting, holes appear in the initially uniform film, then grow with time, until eventually all the polymer is accumulated in isolate droplets on the substrate. When the polymer film is brought below its T g , the pattern is frozen in and preserved. [22][23][24][25][26] Spatially controlled alignment of the droplets or confinement of the dewetted areas can be induced by external stimuli such as stamp or probe, or by using prepatterned substrates. [14,[27][28][29] Sol-gel films are much more robust than polymer films as they are mostly inorganic in nature, so can withstand high working temperature and UV irradiation, are harder, and their refractive index and electronic properties can be modulated. [30][31][32][33] In the sol-gel process, inorganic polymers and ceramics are obtained starting from liquid precursors though hydrolysis and condensation reactions that lead the formation of a network structure called "gel.". This gel is then converted into a dense "xerogel" during the drying through expulsion of solvent and collapse of the porous network and eventually converted into a dense ceramic through calcination at high temperature (if required). [34,35] So far, the dewetting of sol-gel films has been studied only in a couple of papers. [36,37] In this paper, we investigated for the first time the dewetting of bilayers of sol-gel films: the top film is hydrophilic (silica) and the bottom one hydrophobic (CH 3silica), with the objective of producing silicate patterns that are both chemical and topographical in nature. The control of the wettability of the surface is obtained by chemical modification of the sol-gel network by using organic-modified silicon precursors with hydrophobic groups. [38,39] The produced patterns, hydrophilic bumps on a hydrophobic background, mimic the exoskeleton of the Namib desert beetle (which has ≈500 µm hydrophilic bumps on a waxy background), [17,40] and could facilitate the nucleation of water droplets via condensation Dewetting of thin polymer films has been extensively investigated as a way to generate patterned surfaces. In this paper, the controlled dewetting of sol-gel thin films induced by solvent annealing is reported. The key factors that control the dewetting process are identified and patterns with tunable diameter between 5 and 80 µm and tunable height between 1 and 10 µm are fabricated on a large scale. By changing the chemistry of the s...