Lab grown diamond vs Silicon wafers
As a semiconductor a lab-grown diamond can run five times hotter than silicon hotter without degrading in performance. It is also more easily cooled, with 22 times the heat transfer efficiency of silicon.
In November, 2023, Diamond Foundry (DF) produced the world’s first 100mm single-crystal diamond wafer. However their end-game has nothing to do with high carat weight – and everything to do with high thermal loads.
Microchips get hot. The more processing that is required, the hotter they get. That limits the amount of electricity which can be pushed through a chip. In fact heat is the #1 limiter of how fast a microchip can run. For over a half-century this has been a primary design consideration in the building of supercomputers and, more recently, new applications involving artificial intelligence.
That brings us to diamonds, which can carry high thermal loads better than any other substance known to humanity… And to Diamond Foundry, which is using a technology called heteroepitaxy to create these single-crystal diamonds on scalable substrates. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company has run tests on an unspecified high-end Nvidia GPU which uses synthetic diamond wafers, and claims to have clocked three times the recorded performance versus standard manufacturing materials.