As a rule, high temperature superconducting coated conductors have multi-layered buffers consisting of seed, diffusion barrier and cap layers. Multi-buffer layer deposition requires longer fabrication time. This is one of main reasons which increases fabrication cost. Thus, single buffer layer deposition seems to be important for practical coated conductor process. In this study, a single layered buffer deposition of $CeO_2$ for low cost coated conductors has been tried using thermal evaporation technique. 100 nm-thick $CeO_2$ layers deposited by thermal evaporation were found to act as a diffusion layer. $1;{mu}m-thick$ SmBCO superconducting layers were deposited by thermal co-evaporation on the $CeO_2$ buffered Ni-5%W substrate. Critical current of 90 A/cm was obtained for the SmBCO coated conductors.