Growth of Highly (110) Oriented Diamond Film by Microwave Plasma Chemical Vapor Deposition

In this study, we propose a simple and effective approach to enhance (110) orientation in diamond films grown on (100) Si substrates by microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition. It is found that the crystalline structure of diamond films strongly rely on the CH4 concentration in the nucleation stage. Under the same growth condition, when the CH4 concentration is less than 7% (7%) in the nucleation stage, the diamond films exhibit randomly oriented structure; once the value exceeds 7%, the deposited films are strongly (110) oriented. It could be verified by experiments that the formation of (110) orientation in diamond films are related to the high nucleation density and high fraction of diamond-like carbon existing in nucleation samples.