Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapour Deposition of Nanostructured Fluorocarbon Surfaces

Fluorocarbon coatings have drawn much attention in the biomedical field for their peculiar chemical and topographical characteristics. It is well known that topography and chemistry of a material surface can modulate different cellular responses, including adhesion, proliferation and expression of differentiated phenotypes. In this work, PECVD processes were run and micro/nanostructured fluorocarbon coatings were obtained by varying both gas feed (C3F6O and C3F6 feeds) and substrate position in an RF (13.56 MHz) reactor. The interesting results demonstrated that the cell behaviour can be dramatically influenced by surface topography of fluorine containing coatings.