A diaphragm spring is an important component of a clutch assembly, characteristics of which depends largely on that of a diaphragm spring. A diaphragm spring is subject to high stress concentration in driving condition, which frequently causes cracks and fracture around finger area. In this paper, behavior of a diaphragm spring is analysed by finite element method to calculate sensitivity of design parameters, which is used to perform optimal design of diaphragm spring shape. As an object function, hoop stresses are taken and minimized to improve durability. Characteristics of the diaphragm is used as equality constraint to maintain the original design purpose and sequential linear programming(SLP) is utilized as an optimization tool. With optimized design, it is verified that concentrated stress is decreased maintaining release load characteristic.