Large Area Diamond Deposition Using Scanned Plasma Technology

Diamond films grown by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (CVD) have become an important engineering material. Microwave plasma (MP) CVD ofdiamond is particularly advantageous because it leads to material with the highest quality in terms of impurity content, electronic and optical properties, and carries fewer liabilities of power inefficiency and excess heat removal than other deposition methods. It has, however, proven difficult to scale MPCVD of diamond up to production levels due to the small size of the plasma produced under the constraints of diamond growth. Crystallume has developed and convincingly demonstrated a proprietary scaling technology for microwave plasma diamond deposition. In work to date, this technology has powerfully enahnced the deposition performance of a 2.45 GHz diamond CVD reactor. In this program we will characterize and optimize diamond deposition with this new enhancement, developing the necessary processing modifications to use it to full advantage. This will pave the way to introducing it into commercial production equipment in Phase II.