Extremely-thin diamond wafers for electronics made utilizing sticky tape

A brand new method to make ultra-thin diamond wafers utilizing sticky tape may assist produce diamond-based electronics, which could someday be a helpful different to silicon-based designs.

Diamond has uncommon digital properties: it’s each a very good insulator and permits electrons with sure energies to maneuver with little resistance. This could translate to having the ability to deal with larger energies with better effectivity than standard silicon chip designs.

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

Now, Zhiqin Chu on the College of Hong Kong and his colleagues have discovered a method 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 gasoline over it at excessive temperatures to type a steady, skinny diamond sheet. They then created a small crack on one facet 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 easy sufficient to permit for the sort of etching strategies 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 reveals that the strategy 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 normal to many wafer processes, and it isn’t clear whether or not the brand new methodology may be scaled up, he says.

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