Square wafer approach

In the US, Boston-based Apollo has electronics diamond wafer available commercially in bulk with wafers ranging from 3-10mm square and it anticipates having 25mm square wafers soon. Thickness is from 250μm to 4mm depending on application.

Florida-based Gemesis has still not moved from grown %u2018cultured%u2019 gemstones to wafer quality, but is believed to intend to move into the electronics market when it has sufficient capital. (I think these folks purchased some Russian tech to get started)

Europe and Japan have been certainly been investing in diamond semiconductor research, as the latest Diamond 2005 conference in Toulouse indicates.

But it's anyone guess whether Japanese, Europeans or Americans are going to to be first to place their marker successfully on the electronics diamond niche.

DARPA helps use of diamond thin film in MEMS (DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense)

Back in 2001, researchers at Argonne and Sandia National Laboratories developed separate techniques to make diamond film. At Argonne, extremely small diamond crystals were grown for use in MEMS and nanomachines, while at Sandia, researchers devised 'amorphous diamond film' structurally with more chains than a crystal.

It is only now that sp3 Diamond Technologies Inc., a supplier of diamond film services, equipment and products, has been awarded a DARPA contract to introduce its nanoparticle diamond thin film deposition process into the MEMS Exchange. This will give MEMS developers the ability to make cost-effective use of the thermal, mechanical and wear benefits of diamond in their designs.

In early September, just before the contract award, Dwain Adala was appointed president and COO of sp3 Diamond Technologies Inc. as part of the company's repositioning in response to business demands. Most recently, he was CEO of QuickSilver Technology Inc, a fabless chip company developing an Adaptive Computing Machine. Previously, he was CEO of C Speed Corporation, a MEMS-based optical switching start-up, and had held numerous management positions within Mitshubishi Electronics America.

%u201CWe look forward to the formal introduction of sp3's diamond thin-film process,%u201D Michael Huff, director of the MEMS and Nanotechnology Exchange, said he looked forward to the formal introduction of sp3's diamond-film process as %u201Ca significant addition to the many enabling processes already available to MEMS Exchange users.%u201D

The sp3 award from DARPA covers a 10-month project in which the company will also transfer a nanoparticle seeding process developed by the Naval Research Laboratory into sp3's process flow. At the end of the project, sp3's diamond thin film deposition process will be available on 4-inch and 6-inch wafers through the DARPA supported MEMS Exchange. sp3 also has the ability to provide diamond thin films on 200-mm and 300-mm wafers.

%u201CDARPA's support for the use of diamond thin films in MEMS devices, as evidenced by this contract, is a critical recognition of our technology,%u201D stated Dwain Aidala, president and COO of sp3 Diamond Technologies. %u201CThe properties of diamond make it an ideal material for use in MEMS devices where thermal and mechanical management issues are key. By reducing wear and stiction problems MEMS devices will perform better and last longer than devices manufactured with other materials.%u201D

For the US, DARPA's funding (see DARPA helps diamond film) will be an essential, and the bulk of its funding has currently extended past InP, into achieving better quality GaN and SiC materials and devices and improving their manufacturing processes

Then too, diamond has to make it through the commercial courts of companies like Intel, where Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, Intel's director of communications circuits research has said: %u2018It takes us about 10 years to evaluate a new material. We have a lot of investment in silicon. We're not about to abandon that.%u201D