- 30th October 2006 -

ADT Diamond-on-Silicon Product Innovation of the Year Award

Frost & Sullivan has honoured Advanced Diamond Technologies Inc. (ADT) with the 2006 Thin Films Product Innovation of the Year Award for its Diamond-on-Silicon (DoSi) family of Ultrananocrystalline Diamond (UNCD) enabled products.

DoSi wafers are electronics-grade silicon wafers coated with UNCD thin films that are deposited using the company's proprietary CVD process. The UNCD films incorporate most of the outstanding properties of natural diamond in thin film form and have key functionalities beyond those of virtually any other carbon-based material.

Mirror smooth, DoSi has low internal stress, possesses outstanding uniformity, and meets baseline industry-standard requirements for semiconductor manufacturing. DoSi wafers deliver these properties with outstanding thickness and property uniformity for higher yields and lower costs.

ADT currently offers four varieties of UNCD in its Aqua-series of DoSi wafers. They are available on 100, 150 and 200mm silicon wafers, as well as more complex thin film stacks and specialty substrates by request. ADT's spectacular development of the UNCD process and its introduction of DoSi wafers, globally distributed by Goodfellow Corp, make it both commercially reliable and affordable.

"The ADT approach results in a polycrystalline diamond film with grain sizes as low as 3-5nm which is three orders of magnitude smaller than the grains obtained in diamond films using conventional methods," says Frost & Sullivan research analyst S. Sumithra. "It also leads to an increase in the percentage of grain boundaries as a part of the total film surface area."
Significantly, the high-energy grain boundaries of UNCD make it possible to manufacture metallic diamond and gives it a fracture toughness exceeding that of natural diamond. The dominant grain boundaries enable control over the properties of UNCD, through variations in the process, such as electrical conductivity, surface roughness, modulus, and thermal conductivity.

ADT's process deposits diamond at lower temperatures. While traditional processes require deposition temperatures of 800 to 900 degrees Celsius, ADT's UNCD technology deposits diamond at reasonable growth rates at temperatures as low as 400 degrees Celsius; low enough to integrate UNCD with most common industrial hard materials including aluminum and some high-temperature plastics.

This is the critical temperature threshold or limit for active CMOS circuits. The process integrates diamond into semiconductor microelectronic devices making it possible to develop diamond-based micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) where traditional diamond technology is not feasible.

UNCD DoSi wafers' diverse applications include diamond MEMS devices, x-ray windows, and platforms for biosensors, wear-resistant coatings, as nonstick coatings and even as cold cathode electron sources.

Moving towards its vision to be a diamond-enabled product company in the telecommunications, industrial, medical and defense industries, ADT plans to announce its first UNCD wear- resistant product in the 1Q of 2007 and UNCD-MEMS devices in the third quarter of 2007.