Atomic-Level Polishing of Single-Crystal Diamond Using a Combination of Reactive Ion Etching and Chemical Mechanical Polishing

Single-crystal diamond (SCD) is an ideal substrate material for semiconductor devices due to its extremely wide bandgap and exceptionally high thermal conductivity. However, diamond’s extreme hardness and chemical inertness pose challenges for the fabrication of ultra-smooth surfaces. Traditional polishing processes are not only inefficient but also prone to introducing subsurface defects, which severely degrade device performance. To address the above issues, this study proposes a hybrid polishing process combining reactive ion etching (RIE) surface modification with chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), which enables low-loss atomic-level processing of SCD. The study found that RIE treatment induces lattice disorder on the diamond surface, forming a sp2-hybridized amorphous carbon-modified layer. Compared to the sp3 structure of native diamond, this modified layer has lower hardness and is easier to remove. We conducted the verification of the optimized process using high-quality single-crystalline diamond (SCD) samples with an initial surface roughness Ra of 0.68 nm. Under the optimized RIE parameters (substrate bias power: 200 W, etching time: 600 s, gas flow ratio of Ar:O2:CF4 = 40:50:10), the surface roughness Ra was reduced to as low as 0.35 nm after 2 h of CMP treatment. Furthermore, systematic characterization of the SCD’s as-received surface, RIE-modified surface, and CMP-treated surface was performed using Raman spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), elucidating the “etching modification–mechanical removal” polishing mechanism.