Passive Diamond Electronic Devices

Abstract

Diamond electronic device exploration began over 70 years ago with evaluations of natural stones for potential use as radiation detectors.1 Often thousands of natural stones were painstakingly evaluated for their “counting” properties in the presence of ionizing radiation.2,3 Over the years, the electrical, mechanical, optical, and magnetic properties have been studied in natural stones.1 These properties were often found to be superior to those of any other material. The development of synthetic high temperature, high pressure and explosion-based processes for producing synthetic diamonds provided large quantities of similar material beginning in the 1950’s.1 Industrial use of diamonds was primarily limited to cutting and abrasive applications with a few niche applications involving optical windows or heat spreaders.4 Unfortunately, high quality diamond, either naturally occurring or produced synthetically, was still limited to a few square millimeters. Thus, diamond has not found wide acceptance as a material for electronic device fabrication owing to the availability of reproducible high quality large-area, inexpensive material.