Nanocrystalline diamond coating on non-planar silicon substrates.

ABSTRACT

Micro and nanosystems-based products will be an important contributor to the industrial and economic future, as a key value adding element for many sectors. The adoption of micro and nano manufacturing technologies making use of a variety of materials, components and knowledge based technologies will most probably provide functionality and intelligence to highly miniaturised systems. Chemical Vapour Deposited (CVD) diamond is a hard material of high mechanical strength and thermal stability and therefore an ideal candidate for microelectromechanical devices. The latter, is already being used to manufacture sensors, resonators, actuators, biological devices or even plastic moulding impressions, by depositing the film on a structured substrate, by selective growth of diamond on Si using SiO2 masks, or by pattern etching on oxygen-containing plasma. The diamond shaping may also be performed by a fine tuning of the nucleation and growth process. In this paper, it is presented the results of diamond coated structures and an evaluation of its morphology variation with the substrate configuration. The grown films were characterized for quality, surface roughness and microstructure using scanning electron microscopy, Raman and X-ray diffraction spectroscopy and surface profilometry.