Editor’s Note
This article explores Diamfab’s ambitious vision to establish itself as a leader in diamond-based semiconductors, akin to Soitec’s role in silicon. The company is strategically focusing on the high-potential power electronics market, with significant applications in automotive and other industries, aiming to build a new industrial sector from the ground up.
Diamfab dreams of “becoming the Soitec of diamond” and is targeting the power electronics market, which includes applications for the automotive industry among others.
Brick by brick, the Isère-based company Diamfab (23 employees) is laying the foundations for a new synthetic diamond sector in the field of semiconductors, dedicated particularly to power electronics. Whether it’s to increase the charging power of phone batteries, the capacity of photovoltaic panels, or to reduce the size of batteries for electric vehicles… The future electronic chips from this CNRS spin-off, which aim to be designed not on traditional silicon wafers but on wafers built on laboratory-made synthetic diamond, are not yet on the market, but they are gradually heading in that direction.
While installing its first pilot line in the Grenoble suburbs, the Isère-based CNRS spin-off, Diamfab, has just formed a partnership with a Montpellier-based software publisher that aims at nothing less than democratizing the applications of its synthetic diamonds.
While the company completed its first €8 million funding round last year to finance its industrialization process.