Name: How Synthetic Diamonds Are Grown for Semiconductors and Lasers
Uploaded: 2025-09-25T04:01:00Z
Duration: 7 min 2 s
Description: WSJ goes inside one of the world’s leading synthetic diamond labs to see how the material — and its applications — are rapidly evolving.

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WSJ goes inside one of the world’s leading synthetic diamond labs to see how the material — and its applications — are rapidly evolving. Photo: Ian Snape

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250924/43035992-1803-48bc-a7b6-5608d32a3a0b/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

WSJ goes inside one of the world’s leading synthetic diamond labs to see how the material — and its applications — are rapidly evolving.

How Synthetic Diamonds Are Grown for Semiconductors and Lasers 

Narrator: This is a synthetic diamond. It doesn't look anything like jewelry because that's not what it's for. We went inside one of the world's most innovative and closed off labs to see how it makes synthetic diamonds that are used to build everything from drills, to speakers, to lasers. It requires extreme conditions, like plasma heated to more than 3,600 degrees or pressures of 800,000 pounds per square inch.

Be effectively taking a Coke can and putting the Eiffel Tower on top of it.

Narrator: But many scientists think they've only scratched the surface of what's possible and companies are racing to unlock diamond's full potential. This is the tech behind synthetic diamonds. Just south of Oxford, England, Element Six is one of the world's leading synthetic diamond labs.

We are the largest western supplier of advanced materials, and we are one of the largest labs in the world directed to that.

Narrator: It makes synthetic diamonds in two different ways. The first is by using high pressure high temperature reactors, or HPHT. In HPHT, manufacturers start with a capsule that contains a carbon source, some metals, and some tiny diamond particle, or seed. They put it into the reactor, heat it to more than 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit and pressurize it above 800,000 pounds per square inch. For comparison, the pressure used to extract oil from rock formations and fracking is about two to 15,000 pounds per square inch. Under these conditions, the carbon and metals dissolve into a flux and the carbon atoms crystallize on the diamond seed.

These machines are mimicking what mother nature does to grow her diamonds, but just in a very short time scale.

Narrator: So it takes just minutes or weeks rather than billions of years to create this, a composite that will be processed into a finished synthetic diamond. These synthetic diamonds are mainly used to cut other materials, like in drills or mining equipment. They also shape things like the glass on smartphones. The other key technology used to make synthetic diamonds is chemical vapor deposition, or CVD. In CVD, diamond seeds are arranged on a surface that's placed into a chamber, which is filled with gases.

We're using very high purity gases with our carbon source, energizing those with microwaves to create a plasma and ionized gas, and then controlling the temperature and pressure of that environment to effectively get carbon atoms to rain down onto our growth surface and start building our diamond atomic layer by atomic layer.

Narrator: CVD gives scientists more specific control than high pressure, high temperature reactors, but the growth rates are much slower. CVD is typically used to make synthetic diamonds for high-tech applications, like optics, thermal management for high powered devices, or quantum technology. After they're grown, the synthetic diamonds have to be processed, machined to size, and tested. And then finally, they're ready to be used. The atomic structure of diamonds creates their clarity and sparkle, but it also makes them extremely strong, which is very useful for things like manufacturing.

What is intriguing is it's so simple. It's the ultimate covalently bonded structure, just a couple of carbon atoms. But mother nature in her genius imparts such superlative properties to that simple structure that it keeps us going for decades.

Narrator: Diamonds are transparent to visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light, which make them useful for optical windows in lasers or welding equipment. They excel at dissipating heat, which can help keep electronics from overheating, and they can handle extremely high voltages before breaking down, which is why some scientists are studying them as a material for semiconductors.

The synthetic diamond is the supreme material on most properties. That makes it the ideal candidate for many, many applications, most of which we know, but some still undiscovered.

But while synthetic diamonds have advanced other technologies, companies like Element Six are still trying to make synthetic diamonds a multi-billion dollar industry on their own. The key is to get better at making lots of synthetic diamonds with very specific defects. Defects can dramatically change the appearance and properties of diamonds. For instance, diamonds don't typically conduct electricity because all of their carbon atoms are so tightly bound, but that changes when scientists introduce defects through a process called doping.

So for me, it's sort of the next 10, 15 years about, okay, we've got perfect diamonds. Now, how do we unlock the potential by deliberately engineering changes in it to create new potential?

Narrator: There are lots of changes scientists can make to synthetic diamonds to alter their properties. For example, this synthetic diamond is pink because of a specific kind of defect where a carbon atom is replaced by nitrogen and the spot next to it in the molecule's lattice structure is left empty. These pink synthetic diamonds with a nitrogen vacancy defect are ideally suited to work as sensors. That's because the defect has quantum properties associated with it, which are highly sensitive to small changes in the diamond's environment.

It can detect very low variations in magnetic fields, in electric fields, in temperature, and it's that property of the nitrogen vacancy defect in synthetic diamonds that makes it so useful for quantum sensing, quantum computing, and other types of quantum applications.

Narrator: Element Six is also working with DARPA, part of the US Department of Defense to explore the use of synthetic diamonds for systems that could run in extreme environments.

We're waiting for markets to emerge over in scale. There's still very much some hard engineering science questions still to be done.

Narrator: Another factor is cost. Some scientists think synthetic diamonds could one day be used in technology as ubiquitous as semiconductors, but whereas silicon is cheap and widely available, high grade synthetic diamonds are not.

I think in many of the emerging applications, it is going to take five, 10, 15 years for it to really come alive. It's as much how it can be integrated, choosing the right partners as it is the material itself.

But for now, there's still a lot of research that needs to happen to make more of these applications possible.

Today, diamond's been a, still a market niches, high value, hard won niches where diamond unlocks huge potential, but the market scaling hasn't been on the diamond. It's been more on what that potential it enables. I think some of the things we've talked about today, semiconductors will be one, quantum devices if they can really unlock some of the ability to measure things you can't measure before. These are scale markets. So I think we are hopeful, and that's partly why we're here.