Advances in silicon-on-diamond technology

Abstract : In this chapter, a silicon-on-diamond (SOD) substrate technology is presented, in which diamond replaces buried silicon dioxide used in conventional silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers. Diamond is interesting because of its high thermal conductivity (compared to SiO2) while maintaining high resistivity (electrostatic control). SOD technology is thus ideally suited for SOI applications requiring enhanced thermal management. Three major topics are addressed in this chapter in which we aimed at (i) to improving quality of submicrometric diamond films deposited on silicon substrates, (ii) proposing novel thin diamond films incorporation approaches based on molecular bonding and (iii) processing state-of-the-art MOSFETs on such SOD substrates and measuring their electrical and thermal properties.We demonstrate that diamond can be efficiently integrated in a thin-film configuration and that it leads to significant improvement in heat dissipation, in particular with micrometric to submicrometric heat sources.