• Watch IonQ’s Quantum World Congress 2025 Keynote On Demand. • Diamond Thin Films Unlock Foundry-Scale Production for Quantum Technologies Introduction Researchers from IonQ (via Lightsynq Technologies), Element Six (a De Beers Group company), and Amazon Web Services achieved a significant breakthrough in the development of quantum-grade diamond thin films. • The ability to produce high-quality, high-yield diamond thin films opens the door to manufacturing diamond devices at industrial scale - a capability directly relevant for technologies such as IonQ’s memory-enhanced photonic interconnects and repeaters. • Ultimately, this advancement enables development of higher-performing interconnects by leveraging established semiconductor fabrication techniques and infrastructure, and is overall an inflection point in diamond’s capabilities as a semiconductor material. • Diamond thin films and the capabilities they enable build upon over 70 years of pioneering work conducted by Element Six. • Part of the De Beers Group, Element Six has harnessed the extreme properties of synthetic diamond to open up new possibilities in areas such as photonics, acoustics, power transmission, water treatment, thermal management and sensors.
Article Summaries:
- Researchers from IonQ (via Lightsynq Technologies), Element Six (a De Beers Group company), and Amazon Web Services have demonstrated a method to produce high‑quality, high‑yield quantum‑grade diamond thin films that can be bonded onto conventional semiconductor substrates such as silicon. This breakthrough enables the industrial‑scale fabrication of diamond‑based devices, a critical component for IonQ’s memory‑enhanced photonic interconnects and repeaters used in modular quantum computing architectures. By leveraging established semiconductor foundry techniques, the team has removed a key bottleneck in scaling quantum‑diamond technology, marking a significant inflection point for diamond as a practical semiconductor material.
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