We describe how plasma-wall interactions in etching plasmas lead to either random roughening / nanotexturing of polymeric and Silicon surfaces, or formation of organized nanostructures on such surfaces. We conduct carefully designed experiments of plasma-wall interactions to understand the causes of both phenomena, and present Monte-Carlo simulation results confirming the experiments. We discuss emerging applications in wetting and optical property control, protein adsorption, microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip fabrication and modification, and cost-effective silicon mold fabrication. We conclude with an outlook on the plasma reactor future designs to take advantage of the observed phenomena for new micro and nanomanufacturing processes.

Oxygen plasma processing of thermally cured PDMS films results in controlled surface nano‐texturing and wettability. Such treatment of thermally crosslinked PDMS produces spontaneously formed wavy structures on the surface with high nano‐scale amplitude and with periodicity of a few 100 nm. With increasing plasma treatment duration, roughness increased while periodicity decreased, resulting in surfaces of enhanced surface area exploited for the enhancement and control of surface hydrophobicity when followed by Fluorocarbon (FC) film coating of the PDMS surface. We achieved hydrophobic surfaces and super‐hydrophobic surfaces. The mechanisms responsible for the plasma‐induced PDMS surface nanotexturing are discussed, and the variations of the wetting properties have been explained using the Wenzel or Cassie‐Baxter models.

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