Growth of Device-Quality Homoepitaxial Diamond Thin Films

Diamond has an electric-field breakdown 20 times that of Si and GaAs, and a saturated velocity twice that of Si. This results in a predicted cut off frequency for high-power diamond transistors 40 times that of similar devices made of Si or GaAs. Boron is the only known impurity that can be used to lightly dope diamond. This p-type dopant has an activation energy of 0.3 to 0.4 eV, which results in high-resistivity material that is undesirable for devices. However, heavily boron doped diamond has a very small activation energy and a low resistivity and is of device quality. Transistors can be designed that use only undoped and heavily doped diamond. One of the steps in a device fabrication sequence is homoepitaxial diamond growth. Lightly and heavily doped homoepitaxial diamond films were characterized by scanning and transmission electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction, measurements of resistivity as a function of temperature, and secondary ion mass spectroscopy. It was found that under appropriate growth conditions these films are of device quality.