Growth and application of undoped and doped diamond films

Diamond is a unique material with several outstanding physical and chemical properties. It has the highest thermal conductivity at room temperature an d it is transparent from the UV to the far IR. Furthermore it has the highe st hardness, the highest Young's modulus and it is chemically inert and rad iation hard. These and other properties of diamond are of great interest fo r various commercial applications. Much progress has been made in the last decade to produce diamond with chemical vapour deposition (CVD) techniques. Today, CVD diamond plates of more than 10 cm in diameter and more than I m m in thickness are commercially available whose properties, especially the optical and thermal ones, are comparable to the best single-crystal diamond s. In this overview, the historical development of CVD diamond deposition with the main focus on the most important techniques, hat-filament and microwav e assisted CVD, will be resumed. We describe the control of structural and morphological properties during the deposition which is a prerequisite of o riented growth and the doping of diamond which is needed for semiconductor and sensor applications. The second part of this overview will discuss optical, thermal, thermomecha nical and electronic properties of single-crystal diamond and CVD diamond. Finally, we give a description of several applications such as IR windows, heatspreaders, temperature sensors, piezoresistive sensors, diodes and tran sistors.