Hi Maggie,

Those silane you used should give you good result. The ideal process should be:
vacuum the chamber where you put ur mold in; then introduce saline vapor into
that chamber; then close all the inlet and outlet to treat the mold for 30min;
then vacuum the chamber again, may use N2 to flush out the residual silane.
after this process, you should get a good non-sticking mold.    However, there's
an easy way. I used to use HMDS (safer than those u used) in a dissicator and it
worked fine for me. Just pour some HMDS in a glass vial, put the vial and ur
mold into a dissicator, pump it down (not too much, i only used our facility
vacuum line, a mechanical pump should be good enough), close the outlet to
create a HMDS vapor environment for ur mold. let it there for 2 hrs. Open the
dissicator and u should be good to go. you can try to put a small water droplet
onto ur mold and see how the treatment has changed its contact angle.   Good
Luck.
 and be careful with those silane.

Guocheng Shao
--- On Wed, 6/30/10, Maggie Q. Lai  wrote:

From: Maggie Q. Lai 
Subject: [mems-talk] releasing layer for PDMS mold
To: "General MEMS discussion" 
Date: Wednesday, June 30, 2010, 1:13 PM

Hi,

I am trying to coat my glass master mold with with some releasing agent for
PDMS mold.

I found from a lof of papers that it is a common practice to treat the
substrate using fluorinated tricholosilane vapor in a vacuum desiccator to
form a monolayer on the substrate. But I tried with
(HEPTADECAFLUORO-1,1,2,2-TETRAHYDRODECYL)TRICHLOROSILANE (C10H4Cl3F17Si )
from Gelest, but even before I started pumping the desiccator the liquid
silane on the pippet tip and on the wall of the vial already became some
kind of white foam. Consequently the anti-adhesion layer didn't work well.

I am aware that the silane may react with the water in the air, but how can
I avoid that? Seems people always use it just in a fume hood, not a
glovebox. Is there something I am missing? Can you please give me some
solution?  Suggestion on alternative way for releasing layer is also
welcome.

Thanks.

Maggie