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To unfold the promise of diamond as an advanced technical material, single-crystal diamonds (SCDs) and polycrystalline diamonds (PCDs) were smoothed by high-precision three-dimensional movement dynamic friction polishing (3DM-DFP) to achieve the ultra-smooth surface with roughness

The surface conductivity on the H-terminated diamond is still an interesting topic in the field of diamond electronics. Until now, the carrier mobility in the conductive channel has been limited to below 200cm2/Vs due to the various surface scattering mechanisms. In this paper, a high mobility conductive channel on the H-terminated diamond surface was reported. Firstly, the high quality diamond films were deposited on the commercial CVD diamond substrates. After polishing, the H-termination was obtained by hydrogen plasma treatment. The surface morphology of the H-terminated diamond was observed by atomic force microscope (AFM) and scanning electron microscope (SEM). The crystal quality on the diamond surface was characterized by Raman spectroscopy. The impurities in the crystals were tested by photoluminescence spectroscopy. The surface conductivity of H-terminated diamond was monitored comprehensively by Hall test. It can be found that the sheet resistance decreases much and the carrier mobility increases dramatically after the hydrogen plasma treatment and mechanical cleaning. The maximum mobility value is up to 365cm2/Vs with carrier density of 2.9 × 1012 cm−2, which is the highest value reported. Raman spectra of diamond surface show that a peak appears at 1121.4 cm−2 after the hydrogen plasma treatment, which corresponds to the nanocrystal diamond or carbon clusters of sp3 bonded material. The corresponding mobility enhancement mechanism on the H-terminated diamond surface was proposed.

Detonation nanodiamond (DND) is an attractive class of diamond material, which has a great potential to be used for a wide range of applications. In this paper, untreated DND was employed to perform hydrogen passivation process using microwave plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition in order to investigate the influence of hydrogen-terminated surface on the DND's electrical properties. Impedance spectroscopy (IS) has been used to characterize the electrical properties of DND samples using a newly-developed measurement set-up. It is found that hydrogen-passivation process has increased the electrical conductivity of the DND by up to four orders of magnitude when compared with the untreated sample. An RC parallel equivalent circuit with a Warburg element has been proposed to model the DND's impedance characteristics.

In this work, we report high growth rate of nanocrystalline diamond (NCD) films on silicon wafers of 2 inches in diameter using a new growth regime, which employs high power and CH4/H2/N2/O2 plasma using a 5 kW MPCVD system. This is distinct from the commonly used hydrogen-poor Ar/CH4 chemistries for NCD growth. Upon rising microwave power from 2000 W to 3200 W, the growth rate of the NCD films increases from 0.3 to 3.4 μm/h, namely one order of magnitude enhancement on the growth rate was achieved at high microwave power. The morphology, grain size, microstructure, orientation or texture, and crystalline quality of the NCD samples were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), X-ray diffraction, and micro-Raman spectroscopy. The combined effect of nitrogen addition, microwave power, and temperature on NCD growth is discussed from the point view of gas phase chemistry and surface reactions.

This paper reports the first studies on temperature dependent DC and RF characteristics of diamond metal-semiconductor field-effect transistors along with circular-transmission-line-method measurements on hydrogen-terminated diamond surface. In general, the device under study is thermally stable up to 100 °C as it does not deteriorate at higher temperatures with the cut-off frequency for current gain maintained at 8∼9 GHz. It is found that the sheet resistance is almost totally independent of temperature, contact resistance is negligible, and channel conductance underneath the gate decreases with increasing temperature. The threshold voltage for the device is found to shift to the negative side with increasing temperature. A small-signal equivalent circuit analysis reveals that both transconductance and gate-source capacitance decrease with increasing temperature, which results in the almost constant cut-off frequency for current gain. The experimental results can be explained by the fact that with increasing temperature, the band near the Al/H-terminated diamond surface bends upward more weakly, which leads to a decrease of buffer capacitance. At the same time the mobility decreases and the transconductance therefore decreases.

We report great improvement of RF output power for H-terminated diamond field-effect transistors (FETs). For the FET device with a gate width of 1 mm and a gate length of 0.4 μm, the maximum output power (Pout) is 1.26 W, the maximum power gain is 23.2 dB, and the power added efficiency (PAE) is 56.3%. The increase in the device temperature when output power is 0.84 W is only ∼0.6 °C. This is due to diamond having the highest thermal conductivity.

Diamond grown by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) techniques has shown great promise for the fabrication of high sensitivity, low dark current, fast and visible-blind deep UV photodetectors. In addition to the careful choice of substrate material, defect passivation treatments applied to the diamond after growth have been found to considerably enhance the detector characteristics achieved. In this paper, we report on the first purposefully designed one-dimensional CVD diamond imaging array for the detection of nanosecond 193-nm excimer laser pulses using this approach. It is shown to perform extremely well, giving less than 2% pixel-to-pixel variation in signal response, and is fast enough to avoid any sign of charge build-up during prolonged operation.