Diamond-infused chips could triple performance
Lab-grown diamond producer Diamond Foundry is producing synthetic diamond “wafers” for use with silicon microchips to help with cooling.
Martin Roscheisen, CEO at Diamond Foundry, told the Wall Street Journal that the use of its diamond “wafers” allows silicon chips to run at least twice as fast as their rated speed.
Moreover, lab testing with an undisclosed high-end Nvidia GPU showed that performance tripled compared to the same setup with a normal chip based on standard manufacturing materials.
However, it should be noted that there are no publicly available benchmarks to confirm this.
Roscheisen says Diamond Foundry is in talks with prominent chip manufacturers, as well as several defence contractors and electric vehicle manufacturers.
He said the falling cost of synthesising diamonds is a crucial enabler of using the material in chip manufacturing, with the company’s wafers similar in cost to ones made from silicon carbide, which is often used in electronics manufacturing.
However, synthetic diamonds aren’t the only material being considered by microchip manufacturers.
Intel is considering putting its microchips onto an “ultrapure” glass backing, which it says could offer several benefits, including the ability to keep large “megachips” intact.
While the material doesn’t do much to help dissipate heat, it helps the microchip stay intact as it grows in size and has to deal with more power being pushed through it and heat pulled away from it.
Rahul Manepalli, an Intel fellow who works on next-generation chip packaging technologies, said the company wants to start delivering glass-backed chips in the second half of the current decade.
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