Bonding and Integration of CVD Diamond Components in Advanced Industrial Applications

CVD diamond is a well-established and versatile engineering material which can be manufactured at scale to address a broad range of industrial and consumer sectors, such as defense, semiconductor test and manufacturing, high-end audio, and lab-grown jewelry. Typically, the CVD diamond component is integrated into a larger system to provide an engineering solution which exploits one or more of diamond’s remarkable physical properties.<br/><br/>While the successful development of high-quality CVD diamond grades for various optical, electronic, thermal and quantum-sensing applications has been widely reported, the challenges inherent in integrating diamond are less well-understood. Here, many of diamond’s properties, such as its chemical inertness, low thermal expansion coefficient, high stiffness and yield stress, as well as low toughness, present barriers to integration, which if not managed successfully can lead to poor adhesion of dielectric and metal coatings, or highly strained components and interface layers vulnerable to failure.<br/><br/>In this paper we discuss bonding and integration challenges and solutions in the context of state-of-the-art optical and thermal applications of CVD diamond, such as high-power Raman lasers, and heat spreaders for high power RF amplifiers.