Extremely-thin diamond wafers for electronics made utilizing sticky tape

A brand new strategy to make ultra-thin diamond wafers utilizing sticky tape might assist produce diamond-based electronics, which could in the future be a helpful different to silicon-based designs.

Diamond has uncommon digital properties: it’s each an excellent insulator and permits electrons with sure energies to maneuver with little resistance. This will translate to having the ability to deal with greater energies with better effectivity than standard silicon chip designs.

Nonetheless, producing working diamond chips requires massive and really skinny wafers, much like the skinny silicon wafers used to construct fashionable pc chips, which have proved difficult to create.

Now, Zhiqin Chu on the College of Hong Kong and his colleagues have discovered a strategy to produce extraordinarily skinny and versatile diamond wafers, utilizing sticky tape.

Chu and his colleagues first implanted nano-sized diamonds in a small silicon wafer, then blew methane fuel over it at excessive temperatures to type a steady, skinny diamond sheet. They then created a small crack on one aspect of the hooked up diamond sheet, earlier than peeling off the diamond layer utilizing common sticky tape.

They discovered that this peeled diamond sheet was each extraordinarily skinny, at lower than a micrometre, a lot thinner than a human hair, and clean sufficient to permit for the sort of etching methods used to supply silicon chips.

“It is very reminiscent of the early days of graphene when Scotch tape was used to produce the first monolayer of graphene from graphite. I just never would have imagined the concept being applied to diamond,” says Julie Macpherson on the College of Warwick, UK.

“This new edge-exposed exfoliation method will be an enabler for a multitude of device designs and experimental approaches,” says Mete Atatüre on the College of Cambridge. One space it may very well be significantly helpful for is providing better management in quantum units that use diamonds as sensors, he says.

The diamond membranes Chu and his colleagues can produce are about 5 centimetres throughout, which exhibits that the tactic works as a proof of precept, says Andrea Ferrari on the College of Cambridge, however it’s nonetheless smaller than the bigger 20-30 centimetres that’s commonplace to many wafer processes, and it isn’t clear whether or not the brand new technique may be scaled up, he says.

The wafers produced additionally seem like polycrystalline, that are much less clean and common than monocrystalline diamond, and this might restrict its use for some functions, says Macpherson.