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58 min ago 2 min read
UK-based HexSeed Technology has raised more than £600,000 ($810k) in early-stage funding to develop technology that converts captured carbon dioxide (CO2) into diamond coatings for semiconductor devices.
The funding round was led by climate-tech venture builder Carbon13, with participation from the Net Zero Technology Centre and Vento Ventures. The investment also unlocks a Partnership Grant from Innovate UK, awarded provisionally earlier this year.
The company is developing ultra-thin synthetic diamond coatings designed to help manage heat in gallium nitride (GaN) power devices used in data-centre power conversion.
As AI and cloud computing expand, data centres face rapidly increasing electricity demand, while heat management is becoming a growing challenge for the power electronics that feed these facilities.
GaN transistors can operate at high power densities and offer efficiency advantages over conventional silicon devices, but managing the heat they generate remains a major constraint.
Diamond is one of the most effective thermal-conducting materials known, but conventional diamond-growth processes require temperatures that would damage finished semiconductor devices.
Working with researchers at the University of Bristol, HexSeed is developing a low-temperature microwave plasma process that allows ultra-thin diamond coatings to be grown directly onto finished GaN devices without damaging them. The coating is intended to pull heat away from active regions, allowing devices to operate more efficiently and reliably.
The company’s approach forms part of a wider carbon capture and utilisation strategy, using CO2-derived feedstock to produce high-value diamond materials.
The new funding will be used to demonstrate the coating process on commercial GaN power devices and progress towards pilot customer engagements, with data-centre power-conversion hardware the company’s initial target market.
“Data centres are on track to consume a significant share of UK grid capacity within the decade, and a large proportion of that energy is lost as heat in power conversion,” said HexSeed co-founder Mark Tandy.
“This funding will allow us to take our low-temperature diamond coating technology which we are developing from laboratory demonstration to working GaN devices.”
