Northrop Grumman will bury diamond inside its microchips under a $7M award tied to a DARPA heat-removal effort, a bet that the gemstone’s thermal properties can push military radar hardware far past today’s power limits. The money funds phase two of THREADS, the Pentagon agency’s program for stripping heat out of electronics at the device scale.
With Stanford University, the company’s Space Park Foundry grows a diamond film on the underside of each die inside micrometer-scale channels, pulling heat straight off hot spots so radio frequency circuits can hold maximum power. Diamond has been on Northrop’s bench since 2019, and its latest high-power experiments, the company says, showed the material pulling its weight as a semiconductor in its own right.
Heat, says foundry microelectronics director Ben Heying, has always been the ceiling for chip performance, and even workhorse RF materials like gallium nitride run into it. In his telling, the diamond layer acts like a dedicated radiator fused into the silicon, letting circuits push more power before thermal limits bite.
Phase two aims to triple power density on top of earlier gains, which would shrink the footprint of high-power RF transmitters while improving satellite links and next-generation communications. Northrop builds and packages millions of microelectronics a year for defense and commercial programs, and sees diamond cooling as a way to keep US supply chains competitive in high-performance semiconductors.
