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."

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[C4v3_7r0ll]

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.