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Diamond Chips as Alternative to Silicon
John E Toughguy writes: "Cool article on the Chicago Tribune site describing Argonne National Laboratory senior scientist Dieter Gruen's use of buckyballs to create tiny (3 to 5 nanometers tiny) diamond crystals that may prove useful in microelectromechanical sytems."
Just to spur some conversation, I offer my synopsis of the article.
Dieter Gruen has invented buckyball based diamonds that have the ability to conduct electricity when Nitrogen is in between the molecules. They are also extremely small and the combination of these features makes them ideal for MEMS (microelectromechanical structures). MEMS are currently used in mostly medical implementations including micro-drug injections and are silicon based. Silicon is easy to break and cannot withstand high tempurature applications such as a car engine. The use of diamond based MEMS would create as yet unrealized markets for medical and non-medical devices. Although the article didn't specifically mention it, MEMS are the key to most nanotechnology which is a big venture capital buzzword nowadays.
The thing I might wonder about is artificial diamonds. I've heard they can create very small, low quality diamonds artificially, perhaps that would be sufficient for this process, but I know very little and it could very well be a mistake in facts on my part
Synthetic diamond gemstones have been around for quite a while now, though only small ones are cheap enough to be worthwhile to produce. They're commonly used. I don't know what the most common method used to produce them is nowadays, but older schemes made them by applying pressure directly to carbon samples.
Industrial diamond is almost all synthetic. It's produced, more or less, by setting off a bomb on top of carbon powder and diamond dust. The result doesn't look pretty, but is functional.
The semiconductor industry already produces diamond films for a few applications by the same methods they use for other types of film (CVD, etc). You typically don't use buckyballs as the carbon source, as other cheaper chemicals work just as well ("cheap" being relative, as whatever's being used has to be ultra-pure to avoid defects). In practice, diamond-based integrated circuits would be manufactured using techniques like this.
People have been experimenting with diamond-based integrated circuits for a while now. They can operate at much higher temperatures than most other IC technologies, but doping is more difficult (requires much higher dopant concentrations, and there may be other problems).
Diamond MEMS would most logically be produced by methods similar to diamond ICs, to make maximum use of existing technology.