News: Suppliers
6 November 2023
Diamond Foundry creates first 100mm single-crystal diamond wafer
Diamond Foundry Inc (DF) of San Francisco, CA, USA says that it has created the world’s first 100mm single-crystal diamond wafer.
A culmination of work that DF team members started three decades ago, creating the first diamond wafer required the development of technologies including a single-crystal lattice on scalable substrates, large-area diamond ingot growth, diamond singulation technology, and precision-surface processing.
No wafer-sized diamond exists, so DF had to create the “mother of all diamond wafers” then use it to produce more. Employing diamond heteroepitaxy — which creates single-crystal diamond on scalable substrates — and combining it with other technologies, the firm created the first ever wafer that is a single crystal of diamond. Prior simulants existed effectively in the form of compressed powder of diamond but with properties not matched by a single crystal, the firm adds.
In comparison with natural resources, the largest rough diamond ever mined on Earth (the Cullinan Diamond) has a largest dimension of 5.89cm, which is more than 4cm smaller than DF’s diamond.
DF says that its next goal is to further reduce the defect density of its diamond wafer – to realize the textbook semiconductor figure of merit of diamond, which is 17,200 superior to silicon and 60 times superior to silicon carbide.
