Element Six (E6), a world leader in synthetic diamond industrial solutions, and Entegris, Inc., a leading supplier of advanced materials and surface engineering for the semiconductor industry, today announced a strategic collaboration to accelerate the integration of diamond-enabled thermal management solutions into advanced packaging for graphics processing unit (GPU) and radio frequency (RF) devices, which enable high-performance computing (HPC), data centers and high-speed wireless communications, underpinning applications across artificial intelligence (AI), telecommunications and defense.
Image Credit: Element Six
As AI demands continue to drive rapid increases in chip power density, thermal management is becoming a critical determinant of semiconductor performance, efficiency and scalability. Semiconductor manufacturers and hyperscalers are increasingly seeking solutions that enable greater compute performance while reducing energy consumption and system complexity. With conventional cooling technologies approaching practical limits, advanced materials such as synthetic diamond and its composites are expected to play an increasingly important role in enabling the next generation of GPU and RF devices.
Synthetic diamond, which possesses the highest thermal conductivity of any material at room temperature, has emerged as a highly promising solution for advanced thermal management. However, realizing its full potential requires innovative approaches to bonding diamond with semiconductor wafers and dies for integration into advanced packaging, while minimizing thermal boundary resistance at the interface.
The collaboration combines E6's expertise in engineered synthetic diamond materials with Entegris' leadership in semiconductor materials science and surface engineering to develop scalable solutions for incorporating synthetic diamond into advanced semiconductor packages and devices.
The companies are particularly focused on enabling scale, cost-effective wafer-level and heterogeneous integration approaches that can reduce manufacturing complexity, minimize thermal boundary resistance and support the performance requirements of next-generation GPU and RF devices.
The companies will collaborate to provide semiconductor manufacturers with a broad portfolio of diamond-enabled solutions, including engineered surfaces that meet challenging, customized specifications and bonded diamond technologies for both polycrystalline and single-crystal diamond platforms. This flexibility enables customers to select the approach best suited to their device architectures, packaging strategies and performance requirements, reducing integration complexity and accelerating deployment.
"The semiconductor industry is actively seeking new ways to address thermal constraints as advanced semiconductor architectures continue to push device performance to new levels," said Siobhán Duffy, CEO at Element Six. "By combining E6's expertise in synthetic diamond materials with Entegris' surface engineering capabilities, we offer the semiconductor community a new tool box of synthetic diamond-based thermal management solutions, enabling new levels of performance and efficiency."
“The opportunity with synthetic diamond is not simply to introduce a material with promising thermal properties, but to engineer the surfaces and bonding approaches that make it suitable for advanced packaging.” said Olivier Blachier, Chief Innovation Officer and President of Materials Solutions, Entegris. “Working with Element Six, Entegris is addressing an emerging industry challenge by developing a range of approaches from engineered surfaces to bonded synthetic diamond technologies to support the different requirements of next-generation GPU and RF devices.”
By enabling scalable manufacturing approaches and reducing integration complexity, the partnership will accelerate adoption of synthetic diamond across existing and emerging semiconductor needs.