Element Six (E6) and Orbray Co., Ltd., world leaders in high-performing advanced materials, have announced a strategic collaboration to deliver the world’s highest-quality wafer-scale single crystal (SC) synthetic diamond.

Tomorrow’s cutting-edge industrial applications across telecommunications, defense, and artificial intelligence (AI) will place unprecedented demands on power and energy efficiency. Enabling these technologies to reach their full potential requires novel material solutions.

Synthetic diamond, thanks to its superlative properties, including high breakdown field and high thermal conductivity, is the ultimate answer. It promises to become the go-to material platform for the next technological century. However, unlocking these disruptive industrial opportunities can only be realized if a reliable supply of wafer-scale SC diamond is available.

Expand Competency in Diamond Technology

Element Six was the first company to build and develop a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) platform consistent with large area, uniform polycrystalline diamond growth up to 150mm in diameter. Later, it pioneered electronic-grade SC diamond development and production, commercializing its first SC product range in the 2000s. Recently, E6 opened a world-class CVD facility in Gresham, Oregon, enabling sustainable, scale production of high-quality SC synthetic diamond products.

In parallel, Orbray pioneered the development of a unique heteroepitaxial process to grow SC diamond on cost-efficient sapphire substrates. Accordingly, it demonstrated milestone results of SC deposition up to 55mm diameter.

The partnership will combine Orbray’s innovative approach to scaling SC CVD diamond with E6’s proven large area deposition system and expertise in making high-purity SC diamond. Accordingly, they aim to deliver a reliable supply of high-quality, wafer-scale, single crystal diamond for key applications. Among them include 6G wireless components, advanced power and RF electronics, sensing, thermal management, and quantum devices.

Through this strategic collaboration, Orbray and Element Six will cross-license enabling intellectual property and equipment necessary to produce wafer-scale high-quality SC diamond. Eventually, this would expand their core competency in diamond technology ahead of anticipated industrial opportunities.

Element Six’s patented technology and expertise in high-quality SC CVD diamond and large-area synthesis technology is already being exploited in atomic particle detection and researched in novel applications such as radio frequency (RF) transistors, quantum sensing, and quantum-secure communication.

Meanwhile, Orbray’s innovative heteroepitaxial sapphire substrate approach is advancing the research and development of larger SC wafer-scale diamond substrates. Simultaneously, it produces heteroepitaxial SC CVD diamond for novel industrial applications.

As a result, by combining these unique capabilities, the partnership between Element Six and Orbray is poised to deliver SC diamond wafer technology at sizes and levels of quality beyond what is possible today.

Riyako Namiki, President and CEO at Orbray, said, “The strategic collaboration between Element Six and Orbray represents the next milestone to unlock a new era of single-crystal diamond applications, delivering unprecedented competitive advantage and new heights of performance to an ever-growing range of global customers.”

Through its world-leading range of disruptive single-crystal, diamond-enabled solutions, Element Six has already accelerated key advances in a wide range of novel applications. Specifically, it enabled significant milestones such as the identification of Higg’s boson and the advancement of optics technology for metrology in the pharmaceutical industry.

Siobhán Duffy, CEO at Element Six, said, “Both Element Six and Orbray have many distinctive traits in common: a heritage of excellence and trust, spanning over eight decades, as well as a drive for innovation and a desire to push the boundaries of technology to achieve ever-better solutions that can benefit the world.”

“This strategic collaboration will allow us to combine our respective core competencies towards the development of a world’s first: the highest quality wafer-scale single crystal synthetic diamond.”

-11 June 2024-