India Open On Using Lab-Grown Diamonds For Semicon Push

New Delhi: India and the Netherlands can collaborate in research for using lab-grown diamonds to produce semiconductors, a senior government official said on Thursday. Addressing the CII Indo-Dutch Tech Summit, Electronics and IT secretary S Krishnan said that the traditional business of lab-grown diamonds provides a common linkage between the Netherlands, Belgium and India’s Surat district.

He said that the way that lab-grown diamonds can actually be sliced and growing crystals of diamonds is something very similar to the space of growing silicon carbide crystals and other crystals used in the manufacturing of semiconductors.

“People now believe that diamond and lab-grown diamonds themselves can be a very useful substrate for semiconductors. That’s an area of research which can actually be encouraged.

Some of it is also based in the Netherlands, and some of it, of course, based in India and Surat and other places. So clearly, there are many, many areas that we can collaborate in,” Krishnan said.

He said collaboration with the Netherlands brings a lot of value addition to the country’s semiconductor goal as it houses companies like ASML which makes the photolithography machines that are used for manufacturing chips and also has a monopoly in some of the areas.