Diamond Foundry creates world's first 200mm single-crystal diamond wafer

Diamonds have exceptional cooling capabilities due to their excellent thermal conductivity, with the material estimated to be at least five times more conductive than copper. Because of this, Diamond Foundry, a firm focusing on lab-grown diamonds, announced the world’s first 200mm single-crystal diamond (SCD) wafer. The 200mm SCD is about the same wafer size that semiconductor fabs use for older processes, with the company boasting on its website that “Single-crystal diamond has entered the wafer-scale era.” This is part of the effort to manufacture SCD at scale so that it can be used for semiconductor cooling, especially now that increasing power of AI chips has also led to enormous thermal problems.

What makes Diamond Foundry’s 200mm SCD wafer different from other lab-grown diamonds is that it’s created as a high-quality single-crystal piece instead of a polycrystalline gem. …