Scalable Production and Supply Chain of Diamond Wafers Using Microwave Plasma: A Mini-Review

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 grown at low pressure and high 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 homoepitaxy and heteroepitaxy growth techniques, diamond research and technology has recently been 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.