The market for global diamond materials for semiconductor applications will rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.26% over 2017-2021, forecasts a report by Technavio.
Diamond materials for semiconductors are crystalline or amorphous solids with conductivity between conductors and insulators, making them a good medium for the control of electric current. “The use of diamond as a material in the semiconductor industry is gaining the attention of semiconductor manufacturers because of its unique properties such as biocompatibility, exceptional hardness, excellent hole and electron mobility, high stiffness, low friction, and outstanding thermal conductivity,” notes Raghu Raj Singh, a lead semiconductor equipment research analyst at Technavio.
As the miniaturization of electronic devices is leading to the development of compact and high-performance semiconductor components (active and passive), a large amount of heat is generated within electronic devices, leading to low performance. As well as exceptionally high thermal diffusivity diamond also has greater thermal conductivity than the other semiconductor materials.
According to the report ‘Global Diamond Materials for Semiconductor Market 2017-2021’, the top three emerging trends driving the market are as follows.
Growing number of IoT devices
Different vendors across the market are working collectively to address the need of connecting several products such as gateways, home appliances, and entertainment systems for smart homes, sensors, and set-top boxes (STBs) with a common networking standard that provides interoperability with the widest range of smart devices. One of the alliance is AllSeen Alliance, which was founded in 2013 with an objective to create a larger ecosystem of vendors and products.
“Since diamond materials have higher electron mobility and higher thermal conductivity, the manufacturers will adopt diamond materials for IC fabrication.” says Raghu. “This will provide consumers high-performance devices, which will run higher-bandwidth applications at a faster speed without degrading the performance of the device.”
Growing number of data centers
With the rise of M2M (machine-to-machine) communication, Internet of Things (IoT) applications are generating a tremendous amount of new data every minute that must be managed, retrieved and stored between an enormous number of data centers located around the world. The increasing amount of data in the cloud necessitates the development of data centers.
The growing number of data centers is driving demand for high-performance electronic modules that could address the need for increasing bandwidth and minimize the cost associated with power consumption and cooling. Data centers consume about 3% of global electricity consumption, and this is expected to grow with increasing adoption of cloud computing platforms.
Connected cars
Growing demand for safety features in automotive vehicles has forced automotive OEMs to give high importance to the safety features in their vehicles. This is acting as a major driver of demand for the integration of smart features into vehicles. Automotive OEMs are hence providing connectivity solutions in their vehicles that incorporate communication technologies in order to create an automatic system.
The report states that key vendors include AKHAN Semiconductor, Advanced Diamond Technologies, Element Six, IIa Technologies, Morgan Technical Ceramics, and Sumitomo Electric. Other prominent vendors include Diamond Materials, Evince Technology, Microwave Enterprises, NeoCoat, and Scio Diamond Technology.
