Silicon-on-diamond: An advanced silicon-on-insulator technology

Silicon-on-diamond (SOD) technology is proposed as an advanced alternative to conventional silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology. In SOD, the electrical insulator is diamond, the best thermal conductor in nature. In our SOD concept, the diamond film is highly oriented (HOD), 75-100 μm thick and serves as an electrical insulator, heat spreader and substrate. In this paper, we focus on the thermal evaluation of SOD with a Si device layer on the nucleation side of the diamond film. The obtained results indicated that SOD can sustain up to 10-times higher power loads than SOI. The results were experimentally obtained by R(T) measurements of micro-heaters deposited on the Si device layer and by thermal imaging. 3D finite element thermal simulations using ANSYS confirmed that these numbers are in good agreement with expectations.