Nanotechnology Directory

Gelest, Inc.’s Silanes, Silicones and Metal-Organics are key components in a variety of nanotechnologies ranging from materials which owe their fundamental characteristics due to nanoscale fabrication, such as quantum dots, to coating and particulate materials that fabricate structures directly on the nanoscale level which are relateable to bulk behavior. This directory heads refined application search areas.

Probably the most important advance in the last half of the 20th century is the advent of silicon electronics. The microchip, with its revolutionary applications in computing, communications technologies, consumer electronics and medicine, were all enabled by the development of silicon technology. Nowadays, complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS) remain one of the key methods for making microships such as computer microprocessors.

As nanotechnology applications have emerged this millennium, so have silicon compounds and materials emerged together with these new applications, whether they be in fields such as nanoelectronics, or in molecular recognition, in nanosensors, in self healing and self assembling structures, in energy capture storage and transformation devices, in optical applications, in new separations science, in new medicines, in catalysis, in encapsulated nanostructures, in hybrid materials and nanocomposites. A quick glance in several of the application notes on the Gelest website will reveal that silicon compounds and materials are finding their way readily into each of the emerging application areas of nanotechnology. A summary of some of these areas appears below, together with some specific new materials, the cyclic azasilanes, useful in surface treatments, that have come out of our R&D labs recently.

The synthesis of nanomaterials and the assembly of nanostructures into ordered surface topographies renders such new materials both functional and operational; the two crucial aspects of successful nanotechnology. Gelest offers its new silanes that are very volatile and reactive, so that can readily react to nanoparticles without causing agglomeration. These new cyclic azasilanes can be reacted with a variety of hydroxyl laden nanoparticles through a ring opening reaction that is thermodynamically driven without the formation of volatile by-products. Cyclic Azasilanes offer a higher level of monolayer deposition compared to traditional organic silane and metal organic chemistries.

• Lab-on-a chip/ Microfluidics
  • Reprographic and optical elastomers
  • UV directed silicon-dioxide coating formation
  • Adhesive systems for glass-to-glass and glass-to-polymer

• Sol-Gel Precursors
  • Functional and non-functional silicate esters
  • Metal-alkoxides, diketonates and dithiocarbamates for quantum dot synthesis

• Self-Assembled Monolayers
  • alkyl, fluoroalkyl and end-group modified silanes

• Water-Repellent and Hydrophobic Coatings
  • vapor-phase treatments such as hexamethyldisilazane
  • fluoroalkylsilanes
  • reactive silicone fluids