Investigation of ICP Etching of CVD Diamond Film

Abstract

CVD diamond film possesses many outstanding physical and mechanical properties which make it a very important engineering material. However, high hardness value and extreme brittleness have made CVD diamond film a very difficult material to be machined by conventional grinding and polishing process. To solve the problem, there have been many researches focused on improving the surface roughness of the as-grown CVD diamond film by various approaches. The atmospheric pressure air plasma (APAP), in conjunction with the inductive coupling plasma (ICP) was used in the present study to etch and smooth the CVD diamond film. The results showed that the APAP could activate the top layer of the diamond film which made it easy to react with the reactant gases and to be removed during the subsequent ICP process. Though little differences were observed between the micro-Raman spectra of the CVD diamond films with/without the APAP pretreatment, the surface morphology did exhibit quite significant variations.