Scalable Production and Supply Chain of Diamond using Microwave Plasma: a Mini-review

TL;DR

This mini-review discusses recent advancements in microwave plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition (MPACVD) that could enable scalable, high-quality diamond production for electronics and optics, overcoming past limitations.

Contribution

It highlights recent progress in MPACVD techniques that may finally allow large-scale, high-quality diamond manufacturing for technological applications.

Findings

Recent progress in MPACVD enhances diamond quality and size.

New growth techniques reinvigorate diamond synthesis research.

Potential for scalable diamond production for electronics and optics.

Abstract

Discovered and reported exactly 40 years ago, microwave plasma assisted chemical vapor deposition (MPACVD) pointed out an economic technology that could potentially produce lab-grown diamond stones at scale. After this breakthrough discovery, demonstrating that diamond can be growth at low pressure and temperature, the progress quickly curbed and synthetic single crystal diamond (SCD) size and quality could not be improved toward attaining requirements critical in solid-state electronics. This led to the early promise of MPACVD to not come true and slowed the level of investments, thereby further stalling the progress in diamond syntheses. With the invention of a few novel homo- and hetero-epitaxy growth techniques, the diamond research and technology has recently reinvigorated. This mini review attempts to capture the momentum of recent progress in diamond MPACVD that could finally bring scalable manufacturing of high quality large size wafers for future electronics and optics.