Recent Advances in Cubic Boron Nitride Deposition

This article reviews recent progress in the deposition of thick, adherent, cubic boron nitride (c-BN) films. Most of the previous work applied ion-assisted physical vapor deposition methods to deposit c-BN films. The ion impact was successful in nucleating c-BN crystallites, but it resulted in a very small crystallite size and introduced stress, which caused the delamination of films thicker than 100 nm. Recent efforts to reduce the stress and obtain thicker films are described. The limited success of these attempts motivated us to explore chemical vapor deposition methods based on fluorine chemistry. We review this work, detailing the success of depositing thick (>20 μ), stress-free, adherent films with a larger crystallite size and significantly better crystalline quality.