GROWTH OF DIAMOND FILMS ON COPPER

Copper and diamond both have cubic crystal structures and similar latt ice constants, making Cu an excellent candidate substrate for the hete roepitaxial growth of electronic device quality diamond. In this study a Cu substrate preparation method was developed to obtain large-area, free-standing polycrystalline diamond films. Concurrently, a statisti cally designed experiment was used to maximize the diamond film qualit y and resulted in (111) and (100) faceted films of quality comparable to or better than those grown on Si. The diamond films were analyzed b y Raman spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction, and scanning electron microsc opy.