Slicing Diamond Into Usable Semiconductor Wafers With Frickin’ Laser Beams

You Have To Crack It Just Right

Diamond based semiconductors certainly sound interesting but are incredibly difficult to make thanks to the hardness of diamond.  That hardness poses a challenge for anyone who wants to make use of diamond, it tends to split along specific lines when worked and those lines are more likely to destroy the wafer than to break where needed.  To get around this companies have made artificial diamonds to work with, but as you’d expect the cost is quite prohibitive!   A team at the Chiba University School of Engineering have come up with an interesting…