“…The deposition of DLC coatings on engineering components is a standard activity in key industrial sectors including automotive [5,6], micromachining [7], aeronautic [8] or biomedical [9]. The exceptional DLC tribomechanical properties are achieved by means of highly energetic deposition techniques such as cathodic arc evaporation (CAE), pulsed laser deposition (PLD), ion beam deposition, plasma immersion ion deposition, and magnetron sputtering (MS) [10][11][12]. As a result, typical DLC coatings are grown with high levels of compressive residual stresses, which limit the coating thickness, and usually lead to delamination failure [13,14].…”