Japan Developing Diamond-based Semiconductors

s spencer and others wrote in with submissions about Japan funding the development of diamond-based semiconductors to replace silicon chips. The main advantages of diamond include heat resistance and higher electrical resistance.

Comments

Re:if this comes through

[theCat]

hmmmm...maybe. We still don't know what the raw performance of these dia-chips will be. No doubt you are thinking "oh, 1000 degC, that is great for overclocking." But do you really want the equivalent of a blast furnace on your desktop? And, what kind of logic board and surface traces will be able to manage that kind of heat? The answer is, none at all.

These are very special duty devices. They will end up in the exhaust manifold of your car, not the logic board of your PC. They will be built and deployed to resist failure under heat, and might not run even as fast as what you can buy today; clock speed will probably not even make it into the requirements document.

So this is no answer to Moore's Law, more like Murphy's Law; trying to get something that is far less likely to go wrong in places where traditional chips go wrong all the time. Thus we can extend the technology we know well (digital computing) into new places (harsh environments.) It will be interesting to see what they do with that...launch a compact space probe into the corona of the sun? Drop one into an erupting volcano to float around and send data? Lots of stuff comes to mind.

But not overclocking.