Initiated plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (i-PECVD) of poly(alkyl acrylates)

Initiated plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (i-PECVD) is a novel technique that can produce well defined defect free polymeric films on many different substrates with low energy inputs. Although thin polymeric films could be formed using the solution based methods, the solvents used in such methods are not compatible for most of the fragile substrates and it causes major environmental problems. Fast deposition rates, high degree of functional group retention and conformal deposition are desired for most of the applications. In iPECVD, the chemical species called the initiator can easily be dissociated into reactive chemical species at low plasma powers due to their weak bonds. The basic reason behind the use of initiator in PECVD is to keep the plasma power low enough just to break the weak initiator bonds, so that the undesired monomer fragmentation ad chemical functionality lost would be avoided.