Industrial applications across telecommunications, defence, and AI will place unprecedented demands on power and energy efficiency. Enabling these technologies to reach their full potential requires novel material solutions.
Synthetic diamond, with its high breakdown field and high thermal conductivity, promises to become the material platform for the future if a reliable supply of wafer-scale SC diamond is available.
Element Six has developed a CVD platform consistent with large area, uniform polycrystalline diamond growth up to 150 mm in diameter and electronic grade SC diamond development and production, commercialising its first SC product range in the 2000s.
Recently, E6 opened a CVD facility in Gresham, Oregon, enabling sustainable, scale production of high-quality SC synthetic diamond products.
In parallel, Orbray pioneered the development of a unique heteroepitaxial process to grow SC diamond on cost-efficient sapphire substrates, demonstrating results of SC deposition up to 55 mm diameter.
The partnership between the companies will combine Orbray’s approach to scaling SC CVD diamond with E6’s large area deposition system and expertise in making high-purity SC diamond, to deliver a reliable supply of high-quality, wafer-scale, single crystal diamond for key applications, including 6G wireless components, advanced power and RF electronics, sensing, thermal management, and quantum devices.
Through this collaboration, Orbray and Element Six will work together to produce wafer-scale high-quality SC diamond, expanding their core competency in diamond technology ahead of anticipated industrial opportunities.
Element Six’s patented technology and expertise in high-quality SC CVD diamond and large-area synthesis technology is already being exploited in atomic particle detection and researched in novel applications such as radio frequency (RF) transistors, quantum sensing, and quantum-secure communication.
Orbray’s heteroepitaxial sapphire substrate approach is advancing the research and development of larger SC wafer-scale diamond substrates, and simultaneously, production of heteroepitaxial SC CVD diamond for novel industrial applications.
As a result, by combining these capabilities, the partnership between Element Six and Orbray is poised to deliver SC diamond wafer technology at sizes and levels of quality beyond what is possible today.
“The collaboration between Element Six and Orbray represents the next milestone to unlock a new era of single-crystal diamond applications, delivering unprecedented competitive advantage and new heights of performance to an ever-growing range of global customers,” says Orbray CEO Riyako Namiki.
Through its range of single-crystal, diamond-enabled solutions, Element Six has already accelerated key advances in a wide range of novel applications, enabling significant milestones such as the identification of Higg’s boson and the advancement of optics technology for metrology in the pharmaceutical industry.
