Why Has Diamond Thermal Management Not Reached the Semiconductor Conference Agenda?

While preparing a weekly brief a few days ago, I opened the full agenda for SEMICON Taiwan 2026 and paused.

The event, one of Asia’s largest semiconductor shows, had clear top-level themes: AI, advanced packaging, heterogeneous integration, compound semiconductors, strategic materials, testing and smart manufacturing. I went through the major forums and found no session titled “thermal management”—and certainly none titled “diamond.”

That is a strange result. In discussions of AI-chip cooling over the past two years, diamond has been difficult to avoid. Its thermal conductivity is several times that of copper, and it is widely regarded as one of the most promising candidates for managing localized hot spots. If it is as urgent and important as many articles suggest, why did it not even receive a formal mention in the agenda of a leading Asian semiconductor show?

My first thought was that perhaps thermal management and diamond are not actually as important as they appear. Maybe repeated discussion by related companies, media and industry communities has created an impression of an imminent breakout that is ahead of the evidence.

I looked more closely at the detailed agenda and found a different explanation.

The first day of the heterogeneous-integration summit placed package lids, thermal-interface materials, cold plates and liquid cooling inside a larger category called system co-optimization, alongside power-delivery architecture. On the second day, Jentech presented copper-diamond composite materials for lid structures designed around vapor chambers and microchannels. On the same day, GlobalWafers discussed silicon carbide for AI-chip cooling in a strategic-materials forum.

In other words, thermal management was not missing from the conversation, and diamond was not entirely absent. They simply were not selected as standalone themes. They were placed inside the larger container of advanced packaging, alongside power delivery, chiplets and hybrid bonding.

That is the more important signal: thermal management has become a default system constraint in advanced-package design, much like yield or cost. It no longer needs a separate forum merely to establish that it matters.

Why Diamond Is Harder to Find

How, then, should we explain diamond’s limited visibility? If diamond were already a widely adopted cooling material, it would likely appear repeatedly under the advanced-packaging umbrella, rather than only once in a supplier presentation.

I then checked materials from specialist meetings focused on advanced packaging and thermal management. Diamond is being discussed as a concrete engineering problem: courses and papers address diamond heat spreaders, heterogeneous integration, thermal vias in 2.5D and 3D packages, microbumps and chip bonding. That shows that the professional community takes the subject seriously.

But the discussion still sits mainly at the level of courses, papers and engineering exploration. It has not yet reached the point where a major packaging house publicly places diamond into a product roadmap with enough detail to support a standalone conference track.

Product Progress Is Not Agenda Visibility

The most substantive recent development came in June, when Element Six and Orbray announced progress on wafer-scale single-crystal diamond. The companies described a reproducible process for 3-inch wafers, said that 2-inch thermal-bonding wafers were being prepared for volume production, and said that 4-inch development was under way.

This is closer to the real transition from material research to product than the appearance of a material in a conference schedule. But the qualifications matter. Different wafer sizes and applications are at different stages, and “being prepared for volume production” does not mean that large-volume shipments have already begun.

At the same time, some companies have promoted more dramatic claims such as “300 mm diamond wafers.” Public information is not yet sufficient to establish the crystal quality, yield or customer-validation stage behind every such claim. This is one of the easiest mistakes in industrial research: combining progress from different companies and different products into one seamless story.

What the Absence Actually Means

So why has diamond thermal management not reached the semiconductor conference agenda?

The answer is not that it is unimportant. It is that the technology currently sits in an intermediate zone. Thermal management is already a confirmed system-level constraint that advanced packaging cannot avoid. The surrounding industries—thermal-interface materials, cold plates and packaging materials—are mature enough to support their own sessions.

Diamond, however, is still moving from papers and courses toward specific products and customer validation. It has not yet reached the scale of demonstrated deployments required to support a dedicated forum or an entire row of booths.

That is not a dismissal. It is a useful measure of where the industry actually stands: the problem is mainstream, the candidate material is credible, and the productization evidence is still being built.