From Growth to Performance: Emerging Frontiers in Diamond Materials for High-Performance Devices

Diamond's ultra-wide bandgap, high carrier mobility, extreme thermal conductivity, and chemical robustness make it a promising platform for next-generation optoelectronic, electronic, photonic, and thermal technologies. This potential is increasingly unlocked by rapid advances in chemical vapor deposition, enabling precise material synthesis and integration. This review adopts a "growth-to-performance" perspective to evaluate emerging frontiers in diamond research. We first highlight critical progress in diamond synthesis, including large-area single crystal and polycrystalline diamond growth, heteroepitaxy, low-temperature deposition, and advanced doping strategies. We then examine how these upstream material advancements directly dictate downstream performance across three core technological pillars. In optoelectronics and electronics, these material breakthroughs enable diamond photodetectors, high-voltage p-n diodes, Schottky barrier diodes, and field-effect transistors based on both p- and n-type diamond channels. In photonics, advances in nanofabrication and heterogeneous integration are expanding diamond's role in nonlinear optics, integrated photonics, and quantum technologies. In thermal management, diamond heat spreaders integrated with wide-bandgap semiconductors, coupled with advances in thermal metrology and phonon-transport modeling, enable superior heat dissipation and reliability. By connecting synthesis with emerging applications, this review outlines the critical pathways through which diamond is poised to play a transformative role in high-performance technologies across electronics, photonics, and thermal management.