ABSTRACT
So, a procedure to prepare highly adherent diamond films to pretreated silicon nitride substrates was developed by the present authors [11-17]. The formation of a graded interfacial microstructure including the anchored diamond deposition was found to be effective in relaxing the large residual stress between the diamond film and the substrate. The insertion of a diamond-like carbon (DLC) interlayer further increased the adhesion strength of the diamond film. Further study has been carried out to clarify the mechanism of adhesion improvement. In the present paper, our earlier work is briefly reviewed, and the recent experimental results on the interfacial TEM observation and the adhesion evaluation are described as well as the discussion of adhesion improvement mechanism using X-ray residual stress measurements.
