Ultra-thin diamond wafers for electronics made using sticky tape

A new way to make ultrathin diamonds using sticky tape could help produce diamond-based electronics that could one day be a useful alternative to silicon-based designs.

It has diamonds Unusual electronic properties: it is a good insulator and allows electrons with certain energies to move with little resistance. This can result in being able to handle higher energies more efficiently than conventional silicon chip designs.

However, producing working diamond chips requires large, very thin wafers, similar to the silicon wafers used to build modern computer chips, which have been difficult to create.

now, Zhiqin Chu At the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues have discovered a way to produce very thin and flexible diamond wafers using sticky tape.

Chu and his colleagues first deposited nano-sized diamonds on a small silicon wafer, then blew methane gas at high temperatures to form a thin, continuous sheet of diamonds. They then created a small crack on one side of the attached diamond sheet before removing the diamond layer using sticky tape.

They discovered that this azure diamond sheet was very thin, less than a micrometer, much thinner than a human hair and smooth enough to allow the etching techniques used to produce silicon chips.

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

“This new edge-exposed exfoliation method will enable a wide range of device designs and experimental approaches,” he says. Mete Atatüre at the University of Cambridge. One area where this can be particularly useful is to provide greater control quantum devices Those that use diamonds as sensors, he says.

The diamond films that Chu and his colleagues can produce are about 5 centimeters across, which shows that the method works as a proof of principle, he says. Andrea Ferrari at the University of Cambridge, but the wafer is still smaller than the larger 20-30 centimeters standard in many processes, and it’s unclear whether the new method can scale, he says.

The wafers produced also appear to be polycrystalline, less smooth and regular than monocrystalline diamonds, which may limit their use for some applications, Macpherson says.