Page 105 - Visions of the Future Chemistry and Life Science

94 P. W. MAY

amazing material is still in its infancy. Researchers and industry are cur-
rently concentrating upon developing methods to scale up the CVD pro-
cesses and reduce production costs to the point at which it becomes
economically viable to use diamond as the material of choice. With the
twenty-first century now upon us, we are still some way from diamond
becoming the engineer’s dream of being ‘the ultimate engineering mater-
ial’. However, some applications are already in the marketplace, such as
diamond heat spreaders, windows and cutting tools. In the next few years
we can expect to see diamond films appearing in many more applications,
especially in electronics. Perhaps the most likely ‘killer applications’
which will firmly establish diamond as a twenty-first century material will
be in the area of specialised flat panel displays and high temperature elec-
tronics, for which the total available market in the year 2000 has been esti-
mated at US$435 million and US$16 billion, respectively. In some ways
this may be a shame, since familiarity with diamond as just another com-
monplace material may remove some of the glamour and mystique sur-
rounding the world’s most sought-after gemstone.
The author thanks the Royal Society for funding. He also thanks
Professor John Wilson (Heriot Watt University) and Dr Christoph Wild
(Fraunhofer Institut für Angewandte Festkörperphysik, Freiburg,
Germany) for giving permission to reproduce their figures and photo-
graphs.

5.10 Further reading

Dischler, B. & Wild, C. (eds.) 1998 Low-pressure synthetic diamond. Berlin:
Springer. This book goes into more detail about the technical aspects of
making CVD diamond.
May, P. W. 2000 Diamond thin films: a 21st-century material. Phil. Trans. R.
Soc. Lond. A, 358, 473–495. This gives a much more thorough and
detailed scientific account of the subject.
Spear, K. E. & Dismukes, J. P. 1994 Synthetic diamond: emerging CVD
science and technology. New York: Wiley. This book gives a useful
description of the chemistry and physics behind diamond CVD, as well
as various novel applications for CVD diamond.
Ward, F. 1998 Diamonds. Bethesda, MD, USA: Gem Book Publishers. A
compact book with many photographs telling the history of diamond
gemstones.