DF Tech Stack
Over a decade, we have designed, developed, and built from scratch the entire suite of technologies required to create the most extreme material in the universe and to integrate it with semiconductors.
The DF Tech Stack is exclusively used in our own operations.
DF Wafer Heteroepitaxy
No wafer-sized diamond existed anywhere on Earth, so we had to figure out how to create the first “mother” wafer used to produce more. We employ a technology of mind-boggling complexity called diamond heteroepitaxy that allows single-crystal diamond creation on scalable substrates.
Growing single-crystal material always depends on having a single crystal of the same material as a starting point. Otherwise, the atoms added would not know where to locate according to its atomic lattice.
Over three decades of research and development, our team members of Audiatec in Germany have developed a singular know-how to create single-crystal diamonds. By building the equipment capable of exercising precise control over how a layer of ten atoms hits a specialized nanometer sandwich of iridium and yttria-stabilized zirconia on a silicon wafer, we manage to fool these first ten atoms into thinking there is a single-crystal diamond at the bottom when there is not, creating a basis for subsequent ones.
DF Ingot Growth Reactor
Our reactor technology is now in its tenth generation, with higher quality, yield, and productivity achieved in each one. Each of our reactor generations has pushed the plasma to more efficient profiles, nearer to the ideal shape of a flat plasma stretched across a large area disk, which is highly unstable and difficult to achieve.
Our unique equipment architecture also solves other challenges commonly found in diamond growth reactors, such as erosion, overheating, nitrogen contamination, and the containment of high power microwaves.
DF technology enables tight process control over the quality of the diamond we create. We collect more than one billion data points for each carat of diamond produced. We use cloud computing to continually analyze and draw conclusions from these data. We can dynamically tune key parameters during the growth process.
DF Wafer Singulator
The challenge of achieving single-crystal diamond wafers does not end with the creation of a wafer-sized mother crystal. Next is the challenge of how to slice the hardest material on Earth.
Over the past several years, our veteran engineering team has developed our own equipment technology, the DF Wafer Singulator, to efficiently cut single-crystal ingots into slices.
DF Wafer Finish
We have developed cost-effective ways of finishing the surface of a diamond wafer to semiconductor-grade requirements: a flatness of as little as one single atom up or down over inches of distance.
So transistors of atomic dimensions can be embedded, semiconductor wafers have an extremely flat and smooth surface. Modern wafer bonding technologies are now employed at scale to produce wafers composed of various materials. In order to leverage these technologies, a diamond wafer has to meet identical surface requirements. We use advanced polishing technology for the hardest material in the universe to achieve this, which is not a straight-forward process.
DF Chip Bonding
We have developed a suite of techniques to put a diamond behind every chip, whether a high-power silicon, a SiC power-electronics, or a GaN communications one.
We bond the most advanced semiconductor chips across many industries to our diamond wafer substrates to eliminate the heat dissipation bottleneck that limits their performance. The bonding is extremelly reliable as we connect chips and diamond directly and atomically.