Slashdot Mirror
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.
pentium iii=mitsubishi?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I heard in asia that people give mobile phones with diamonds in them as engagement rpesents, so maybe they are taking a stab at the engagement market :)>
Computer recycling may have a chance after all ... how many circuits do you have to kill for an engagement ring?
"Pentiums are a girl's best friend"?
Okay, that's not funny. Taking off Score +1 Bonus.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
She's been pushing for a diamond for a little while now - I wonder if she'll be upset if she gets it in chip form rather than the traditional ring?
This is a breakthrough in wearable computers!
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I would say "yes," but why does the ring say "Intel Inside?"
Moore's Law's funeral will have to be postponed for a little while longer yet again.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
The main disadvantages include the fact that diamonds are terribly expensive :)
Isn't that a bad thing? It would increase power requirements, create heat, etc. Even if a diamond chip could stand that, not everything else in the box can - not to mention being a problem for laptop batteries.
I'm glad they waited until after I bought an engagement ring...
Intel may now become the United States largest diamond importer.
Just as long as the jewelry store doesn't put up a sign saying "Intel Insides Inside"
As I recall, one of the ways to utterly destroy a diamond is to run an excess amount of current through it. So, if you try to overclock your diamond chip, could you vaporize it? What about current overloads caused by over heating or bad power supply? Could be interesting.
In the wild there are no dumb lions tigers or bears. Only humanity subsidizes the continued existence of the stupid.
this will be a better plan if someone can bust the debeers monopoly, and make diamonds a semi-precious stone.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Imagine the overclocking!
Tell me, when we reach temperatures that will make Si melt :)
I thought the main advantage of diamond over Si is a better heat conductance.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Now the diamond conglomerates will face extreme pressure to quit artificially inflating and regulating the cost of diamonds..
Another case of life imitating art... or at least catching up with it. To anyone interested in nanotechnology, I suggest reading the Neal Stephenson book "The Diamond Age".
_______
2B1ASK1
I'd hate to pay for a beowulf cluster of those!!!
When I was at Auburn, we had Star Wars funding to look into this. We had created a diode that switched at 2000 celcius.
The idea was to have IC circuits right inside the rocket engines.
Pentiums are forever????
Wait a minute...
The main advantages of diamond include heat resistance and higher electrical resistance.
This seems to be going quite in the opposite direction of superconductor research and what most people generally think of as sound design principles - less electrical resistance means a more efficient contraption, right? So what gives? I can't get to the article from here given my Christmas-reduced bandwidth, but is this a Slashdot misprint or is this the truth; and if it's real, then what gives? Why is higher electrical resistance suddenly an advantage?
There is (at least) one key advantage silicon has over diamond (or any semiconductor except Germanium). It has a self-repairing crystal lattice. When dopant atoms (phosphorous, arsenic, etc.) are injected into the bulk silicon wafer using ion implantation (diffusion not used in practice too much anymore) they cause structural damage to the crystal lattice which would hurt circuit performace. However, Silicon has this magical property that if you heat it up to the right temperature (several hundred degrees Celcius) the lattice begins to reorganize itself to incorporate the dopant atoms without damage. Tis process is called Annealing and it is one of the key reasons Silicon became the dominant semiconductor (the other was the availability of a good thermal oxide, SiO2).
Diamond does not have this desirable property, so a lot of research will have to go into maintaining the quality of the crystal lattice.
Here's some background on diamond films:
In July of this year, scientists in the United States reported that isotopically pure diamond films (containing 99.9% carbon-12 and not the 1% carbon-13 that is present in natural diamonds) had been grown. The pure films not only conducted hear 50% better than the best natural diamonds but also withstood damage by laser radiation ten times more effectively than natural diamond.
One could have the concept of combining functions: Glass that serves as a semiconductor, etc. Interesting.
I don't know if manufactured diamonds theaten the jewelry industry, but I doubt it. Although hundreds of almost-slaves labor in mines so deep it's scary, and the industry is full of creepy deals, people buy them, and the industry churns them out just the same.
mug
I've said this already, but the article was confusing. They meant diamond has a can withstand higher temp. and voltage, not that it was higher resistance in an electrical sense. Their use of resistance had nothing to do with Ohm's Law. I guess the author didn't know about the way the phrase is generally used in electronics.
Also, they are talking about semiconductors, not superconductors. Very different beasts.
The more than something costs, the more practical refining lower quality ore or synthetics becomes. You do it on too large of a scale, however, and you flood the market, and you can't make a profit, so it's a fairly delicate balance.
There may also be advances in detection technology, collection, or other factors that'll result in more expense, but with it, greater abundance.
I mean, think about it... scientists and environmentalists keep talking about how we're going to run out of fossil fuels, but they always seem to keep extending out the critical date... It most likely will run out sooner or later, but the oil companies will keep finding a way to prolong it to make a profit as long as they can.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Yes Diamonds are better than Silicon but:
You still cannot get past some limmiting factors like speed of light and the absolute minnimum structure size.
What the Japanease are looking into will be very large chips. Diamonds are the only good way to get a good yeilds of these. But still when you have a 10x10mm 100 GHz chip it takes several clock cycles to get some information from one side of the chip to the other.
Normal design methodologies will no longer work in the near future just like they are starting to get difficult now. (Moore's Law slowing down)
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
conduction is the opposite of resistance. Hence a semi-conductor could be called a semi-resistor, so to speak.
Indeed diamonds are not semi-conductors but complete insulators and they dont pass current. Its rather bizarre but micro-electronics is not of the hardest classes. Its really a physics class to do with electron migration...
When I die maybe I can become a CPU! Thanks to intel and lifegems http://www.lifegems.com Maybe Intel will want to buy grandpa when he croaks. In the future you'll be able to get a faster processor everytime a loved one dies!
I got my girl a diamond earing so she had some processing power above the neck.
Now SHE wants a beowulf cluster of these.
All useful semiconductors are actually semi-insulators: you need doping and bias to promote electrons to the conduction band. In fact, semiconductors are sometimes characterized by their "bandgap voltage" which means how much voltage is required to promote an electron from the valence band, where it is tightly held to the lattice, and the conduction band, where it can move freely as part of an electrical current. The thing that makes diamond withstand high temperatures and voltages, its high bandgap, is also on of the things that makes it hard to work with.
Not all diamonds are gem quality, and therefore, not as valuable (leaving aside for the moment the debate about the "value" of objects purely because they're shiny). In another life, or at least it seems that way, I was a machinist. Diamond cutting bits are quite common and desirable (for some jobs) because of their hardness. While these tools are more expensive, because they don't use gem quality diamonds, they aren't near as expensive as you would think.
It's doubtful that any gem quality diamonds would ever be used for chips.
The main advantages of diamond include heat resistance and higher electrical resistance.
And a certain BLING, BABY!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
heat tolerance is important as the power dissipated is impressive with today's chips. Due to diamond's rather large bandgap, heat tolerance is a better than Si. Resistance is also useful. I'd imagine creating a MOSFET with a leaky gate is problematic. Part of the reason that BJTs dominated in the early days of the semiconductor industry is the lack of a suitable substance as an insulator between the gate and the channel. I'm thinking the researchers are referring to diamond's natural ability in undoped form to resist current flow, so that's one less obstacle to overcome.
The idea of using diamond as a semiconductor has been kicking around for years with quite a bit of research being done world wide.
Technology Research News has an article published in September that discusses this.
Among other things they mention that diamond's charge carrier mobility is three times better.
Diamond transistors could in theory deliver one watt of power at 100 gigahertz, or billion cycles per second, said Isberg. This is five times faster has been achieved using the semiconductor Gallium Arsenide.
Diamond-based electronics would also be better than existing semiconductor materials for high-temperature applications, said Isberg. Diamond conducts heat 15 times more efficiently than silicon, and therefore cools faster.
etc. etc.
www.bannination.com Two things float to the top he
We cue the pseudo-gangsta asian kid saying "Even mah pc is iced out FOOOL!"
How will we tell the people from the machines if we can't refer to them as carbon-based and silicon-based life anymore?
Read the full text my book Perl for the Web
- Diamonds, as used in jewelry, are artificially rare. That's right.. the rock on your engagement ring is only rare because DeBeers & friends keep millions and millions of diamonds locked up in vaults. This is not conspiracy theory... it's a verifiable fact.
- The average cost of diamond, if all diamonds available were in circulation, instead of in vaults, would be about $1.50 per ct.
- Small diamonds, the kind used in diamond saws, industry, etcetera, are NOT expensive, like your engagement ring. Small diamonds are common and cheap, because they have no real jewelry market. Diamond impregnated stones and blades cost more because it costs more to manufacture them.. not because of the diamond.
- Good luck convincing your girl of ANY of this. You still have to buy that rock. Get over it..
How else can two months' salary last forever?
And you guys thought they couldn't find a way to make computers really expensive again!
...include... higher electrical resistance.
Is that all it takes? I have lots of stuff here that might be groundbreaking...
World awed by carpet-based semiconductor
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
very high resistance is good for the substrate, upon which you place your doped (conductive) materials for active components, and metals for "wires"....this keeps current leakage down.
I wonder how they're going to replace SiO2 as an insulator. With silicon, if you want an insulator, you just add oxygen and heat a bit and you get an SiO2 (glass) layer, which is a good insulator. With Carbon (diamond), all you'd get is CO2, which is pretty useless (not to mention anti-Kyoto). They'll need a good (and cheap) insulator for carbon, don't remember what they did for GaAs, though...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I thought everyone knew that the favorite gem of the Japanese was the Ruby!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
True quartz has piezoelectric factors... but Diamonds can burn! Just like coal... except they explode due to the pressures inherit in their creation...
Overclocker1: Shit, wonder how many more degrees I can clock this baby...
Overclocker2: Did you remove the oxygen?
Overclocker1: What? Why?
*BOOM*
Okay, maybe not that drastic... but it's pretty nasty.
Winged Power Photography
"This property means that diamond chips can work at a much higher frequency or faster speed and be placed in a high-temperature environment, such as a vehicle's engine..." ... or an Athlon machine.
They used to used vaccum tubes to build computers before. Some properties of vaccum tubes were inherently more valuable than heaps of sand.
How is it that they aren't using vaccum tubes any more?
Oh wait... You didn't mean that kind of Sun.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
Scuffing feet new trend in tablet-pc users
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Yep. I can just see it now. Camouflaging my 4 processer server as a hot-plate. Problem is, when I set my computer to 'simmer' quake goes down to 158 frames/second.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
actualy diamonds are abundant, its just that the ones good enough to make a ring out of are very rare , the majority of diamonds they pull out of the ground are ether too yellow or are not shaped properly making them useless for anything other then sand paper
I think so.
n.
A man to whom a woman is engaged to be married.
Think you meant "fiancée", there, ace.