Other uses for polymers in manufacture

To obtain a pre-formatted master, a polymer photoresist is spin-coated onto a glass disc, and is rotated with high precision under an argon-ion laser that is modulated with the information. The resist is then developed and coated with a thin layer of silver, and a nickel master is grown by electroplating. When the master is split away from the polymer, it contains a perfect replica of the pre-format information. 

Recent work on plasma polymerization [31] shows promise for providing good barrier layers (especially for magneto-optic erasable media) and abrasion-resistant coatings. But plasma-polymerized materials (such as diamond-like carbon, produced by polymerization of ethene or ethyne) are so disordered, crosslinked and ill understood that they hardly qualify for the term polymer, and will not be discussed further in this chapter. 

---