Okay this is cool research
just one tiny tiny microscopic question...
why would someone use diamond wafer costing 1000x more than a silicon wafer??!
:)
> why?
>> 50x faster switching
It's hard to say which applications will benefit the most, but orders of magnitude improvement tend to enable qualitative shifts downstream.
Not to mention, 1000x is just the cost right now while the tech is new.
Possibly on a par with the other exotic materials currently in use.
The moment it becomes useful its cost will fall down to silicone prices really fast.
Right now you can buy 100g of diamonds for low teens in $ from China. Diamonds are produced in enormous quantities as abrasives. And if you do something on large scale you become better at it.
So far we haven't invested in big monocrystals because there was not much use for them aside from jewelry and probably other small niches. The moment some R&D makes something useful out of them - they will be Jevoned into oblivion.
The higher the voltages it can handle, the faster it can switch efficiently, and the better the thermal performance, the wider its potential applications in power electronics.
If I'm reading this correctly it's two or threefold. Faster switching times, which both increases max speed and reduces power consumption. Avoids flaws due to silicon doping, presently we add ions to silicon to get P or N type junctions and they've found a way to get P type junctions using "2D Hole Gas" which is basically a thin layer of voids inside the bulk diamond crystal after treatment and avoids a category of flaws that affect silicon yields. Third, and this is speculation, but diamond has a way higher thermal conductivity and lower thermal expansion coefficient, so it can likely withstand higher temps and conduct heat away faster.