Improvement on p-type CVD diamond semiconducting properties by fabricating thin heavily-boron-doped multi-layer clusters isolated each other in unintentionally boron-doped diamond layer

We have developed a new fabrication process to decrease the effective activation energy of B atoms doped in diamond without a significant decrease in the carrier mobility by fabricating heavily B-doped clusters with very low mobility which are embedded in lightly-B-doped diamond layers. The resistivities of the heavily B-doped and unintentionally B-doped diamond stacked layers had almost no temperature dependence, suggesting the presence of an impurity-band conduction in these diamond layers. On the other hand, the resistivities of the samples after the embedding growth process of the stacked layers that had been appropriately divided to innumerable small clusters by means of a suitable etching process increased with decreasing the temperature from 330 to 130 K. The effective activation energies and Hall mobilities at room temperature of both samples were estimated to be 0.21 eV, 106 cm2 V−1 s−1 for micron-sized clusters and 0.23 eV, 470 cm2 V−1 s−1 for nano-sized clusters, respectively, indicating that the diamond film structure fabricated in this work is effective for the improvement of the p-type performance for the B-doped CVD diamond.