Transforming lab-grown diamond into breakthrough technologies
We're engineering diamonds for pioneering healthcare, quantum and net zero technologies.
A diamond is not just “forever”.
Its rare combination of properties gives it enormous potential for managing heat in next-generation electronics, quantum and compound semiconductor technologies, as well as enabling ultra-sensitive sensors for future healthcare diagnostics.
Unlocking that potential, however, is exceptionally challenging.
Growing pure, synthetic diamond nanoparticles is difficult enough, but the greater challenge is combining them with other materials so that they can be deployed in real-world devices.
From carbon to crystal
In our Diamond Foundry, Professor Oliver Williams and his team have cracked this problem.
Their research has pioneered new ways of integrating diamond with advanced materials, creating bespoke, precision-engineered diamond wafers for UK innovation.
“What drives us is how we can solve challenges facing future technologies. Diamond offers us a unique opportunity to create some of those solutions.”
Unlike the high pressure synthesis used for most commercial diamond, our lab grows diamond from gas at a much lower pressure in Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) reactors.
Using a controlled vacuum process, the air is removed from the chamber and replaced with a hydrogen-methane mix. The gas is then excited with microwaves to form a plasma.
Our researchers grow ultra-pure, defect-controlled diamond wafers on the plasma, which can be tuned for specific applications through heterogeneous integration: combining it with other materials.
“Diamond growth needs high temperatures, which are not compatible with biological environments such as in the NHS. So we grow the diamond, smash it, and organise the nanoparticles in the way that the medical researchers need it for their diagnostics innovation.”
— Professor Oliver Williams, Head of Cardiff Diamond Foundry
Imagine a lateral flow test that's a hundred times more sensitive. Diamond's ultra-sensitive sensing capabilities make this possible.
Or being able to detect subtle biological changes at cellular level before any symptoms of disease appear. The latest quantum sensors work at atomic level and are able to pick up very weak signals emitted by the human body that are difficult to detect with traditional diagnostic tools, such as scans and blood tests.
But quantum devices need expensive, ultra-cold environments: not ideal in a typical NHS clinical setting.
However, used with diamond, they can operate at room temperature under everyday conditions.
Next-generation healthcare diagnostics
Professor Williams hopes that translating advances in materials science into earlier diagnosis, through ultra-sensitive blood tests, faster MRI scan times, and improved access through lower costs and portable instruments will lead to better outcomes for patients and help reduce costs for the NHS.
“We’re working with partners within UKRI’s Quantum Biomedical Sensing (Q-BIOMED) Research Hub – the UK’s first quantum hub for biomedicine - which aims to deliver a step change in earlier disease diagnosis and treatment for diseases including cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
“By helping clinicians detect disease earlier and more accurately, we’re contributing to a future where healthcare is more predictive, more personalised and more effective for generations to come.”
Brilliant solutions for net zero
What if mobile phones never overheated, electric vehicle chargers delivered more power and quantum computers became practical?
As our electronics become more powerful and demand for cleaner energy technologies grows, thermal management has become one of the biggest challenges to progress.
Diamond's exceptional capacity to conduct heat makes it an ideal partner for the next generation of high-performance computer chips, quantum technologies and advanced compound semiconductors.
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Reducing temperatures
Quantum centres in diamond can operate at room temperature, unlike many quantum systems that require extreme cooling. -
Reducing CO2
Using diamond can reduce the carbon footprint of power electronics by 30%. -
Increasing reliability
Diamond-based high frequency filters can reduce the size of mobile base stations, reduce their carbon footprint and increase reliability.
“I’m growing diamond wafers for the European Space Agency, which will be used in satellites. As diamond is so good at regulating temperatures, this means satellites are less likely to break down from overheating.”
— Dr Jerome Cuenca, Research Associate
Building capacity for the future
While our diamond technologies are moving beyond the laboratory into real application, challenges around scale and integration remain.
Dr Jerome Cuenca is a Research Associate in Professor Williams’s lab. He’s focusing on making our diamond wafers more scalable. His research seeks to increase the plasma from small, two-inch wafers into the larger sizes needed by semiconductor industry.
Fellow Research Associate Dr Soumen Mandal adds: “One of the key challenges with synthetic diamond films is that their surfaces can be quite rough, which can limit their use in advanced devices.
“One of the unique things our team has done is to develop a specialised polishing technique, making the diamond surface extremely smooth - less than a billionth of a metre rough in some cases – making it suitable for high-performance technologies.”
“The main thing that excites me is to make our world as carbon neutral as possible. With AI and all the power devices we're now using we convert a lot of electricity to heat, decreasing device lifetime and upping our carbon footprint. Using diamond, we can move faster towards a carbon-neutral world.”
— Dr Soumen Mandal, Research Associate
Harnessing diamond’s remarkable properties could be transformative for healthcare and bring us closer to net zero.
Professor Williams says: “Heterogeneous integration is a very new approach to the latest electronics. What really excites us is not just the academic discovery but crossing the boundary for it to be used in the real world, whether that's making a difference to diagnostics in the NHS or reducing the carbon footprint of our communication systems.”
This is future generation thinking.
A critical supplier for UK innovation
Created in 2011, Cardiff Diamond Foundry is the UK’s largest diamond growth group.
It develops Nanocrystalline Diamond (NCD), a thin-film form of diamond that retains many of diamond's exceptional properties, but at a significantly reduced cost.
With four Chemical Vapour deposition (CVD) systems, comprehensive thin film metrology and Chemical Mechanical Planarization (CMP), it focuses on developing solutions that are not commercially available, such as integrating diamond with novel materials (such as GaN) and in-situ monitoring.
