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depends on what it's made of.. You'd need something with a Mohs hardness rating greater than that of refined silicon, or quartz. (Means a hardness score of greater than 7, which means something like Corundum (Ruby/Sapphire/etc.) or synthetic diamond.

Synthetic corundum is actually quite clear when it is made without any colorizing impurities, and admits much more light spectra than does silicon. It has been used successfully as a semiconductor medium, and is gaining traction as a process substrate in bulk.

(It is also technically feasible to manufacture it in large single crystals, for use in making solar collectors or mirrors.)

No need to get so fancy. Normal lenses ("concentrators") and used with high-efficiency triple-junction cells to collect light from a large area (see Emcore's page for an example). In fact these cells perform better with higher intensity light anyways.
Fraunhofer is using a slightly different approach that looks to get better and better as light intensity increases: article

It's so Roland the Plogger.

1. Find some minor advancement in materials science.
2. Hype it as big breakthrough.
3. Post on Slashdot.
4. Direct traffic to ad-heavy blog.
5. PROFIT!

The "breakthrough" this time is that someone made gallium nitride substrates that might, someday, be useful for LEDs. After they solve the problem that their material cracks during cooling. However, Panasonic did that last year, and has been shipping white LEDs using that approach in sample quantities.

unconcentrated solar cells, which nobody uses. At present, all the solar generating plants in the world use mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on the solar cells, thereby greatly increasing performance.

Please cite your sources. Nobody uses unconcentrated cells? I've only heard of a few companies working on concentrated PV (SolFocus, Green & Gold Energy...), nevermind what is actually deployed! From a page about the first conference about concentrated photovoltaics, held in 2008: "CPV is as an industry on the brink of commercialisation."

You might be thinking of concentrated solar thermal which concentrates sunlight with mirrors to heat up a working fluid and drive a heat engine to make electricity?

CPUs have stalled out at about 4ghz overall clocking, cutting edge transistors seem to be hitting a wall at about 500-600ghz.

Now granted faster gate transitions make for faster CPUs, but multiple gate operations are necessary for each state change, add signaling and propagation delay and who knows what you can really clock the CPU at (I am not an Electrical Engineer).

Here is a page link claiming a record 562ghz transistor switching in Oct. 2002 article

here is another claimed record of 509ghz, Nov, 2003 article
Obviously at odds with the 2002 anoucment. Undoubtedly it should narrow its claim for a specific transistor type.

Here is a U of I annoucment calming a record 382 ghz Jan. 30, 2003 article
But expects 700ghz by early 2004 (I'm guessing they didn't make it).

Lets assume 562ghz in 2002, so we - drum roll please --- 7.5% increase in speed in 2 ½ years!

This is not going to keep Moore's Law humming along.

Even stranger, here are claims of TerraHertz transistors at Intel in 2002 article

Ironically, while googling for transistor or gate speed will show hundreds of hits, you can't actually find the switching speed for individual gates in a P4 or AMD chip. This stuff seems to be super secret stuff, and only the overall CPU clock it published. I wouldn't be surprised if the individual gates and transistors are transitioning at several dozens of ghz if not a couple of hundred or more. While Moore's Law death claims may have been premature 10 and 20 years ago, they may not be now.

I hope I'm wrong, I want my Holodeck Playstation 5 in 2015.

http://compoundsemiconductor.net/articles/news/8/1 1/26/1

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/articles/article. asp?liArticleID=38164&liArticleTypeID=1&liCategory ID=4&liChannelID=109&liFlavourID=1&sSearch=&nPage= 1

WTF kind of name is Claria? Sounds like another company I did some contract work for a couple of years ago that got sued by Stanford Univ. because they used Stanford in their title (and had a red "S" logo that looked like Stanford's "S"... uhm, duh, just asking for it). They paid some firm to make up a name and research to make sure that no one already had it and switched to "Sirenza".

Heh, I did a google for Sirenza and Stanford to see if I could find further info on the name change and first found a link on Stanford.edu's site regarding alleged foul play in their IPO

Claria sounds like an STD if you ask me. Something you don't want, much like Santorum (if you don't know the reference, pull down a torrent on Unscrewed 04/07/2004, or just Google for it).

It seems the real question of relevance rests in the new technology they're using to build these devices. The FinFETs have a nice writeup here. They can be built just with the defects from plateaus in normal photo-lithographic processes, thus using the nicely developed techniques usually limited to 125 nm structures to build 10 nm structures. This still means the overall transistor size will be on the order of a a few hundred nm, to deal with contacts, etc, but it is a sight better than standard 0.13 micron transistors, and much easier to use in mass production than e-beam lithography. (Just think about those old vector displays -- that's ebeam lithography for you). Seems like a fine idea for nanoscale structure building, and not one of these technologies may have impacts far beyond just standard IC circuit technology; with 10 nm devices, all sorts of quantum coherent processes become accessible, if you work for them.