Vapor Phase Deposition of Polymeric Coatings for Nanostructured Devices

Vapor phase polymerization is a solventless coating technique in which gas phase monomer and initiator molecules are fed into a vacuum chamber. The polymerization mechanism is a free radical polymerization. Changing the monomer feed into the reactor allows us to tailor the surface properties of the resulting coating. Our current work utilizes vapor phase polymerization to coat nanostructured and microstructured devices with functional polymeric coatings for use in biological detection. Process parameters are studied to optimize the uniformity of the polymeric coatings. Responsive coatings are used to pattern and immobilize biomolecules onto the devices.