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The Diamond Age
bigner writes "The new diamond age is here and will revolutionize the computer industry. Diamonds show amazing potential as a superior semiconductor."
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So this would make my sig a good thing?? I want a computer made of diomonds.
-=You might be a geek if your computer is worth more than your car=-
... I guess this is it.
Apple invented the word 'super,' and also invented incredibly over priced computers. You PC losers are just jealous.
Now it will be back in the day when computers cost like $4000. Oh yea, no more stupid users. If someone really wants a computer they're going to have to take the time to learn to use it or it will end up being a waste of 4 grand instead of $600. I predict a new golden age!!!
Help I'm a rock.
...diamonds are forever...
Proves a visionary? Not only would it be an excellent proliferate conductor, it could be used to lace and coat construction materials.
So now computers can get me laid!!!
Just another day in Paradise
Hmm, my primer didn't mention anything about a new Diamond age. Maybe I have a bad ractor.
... cheap!
It's also one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors.
5 53 380966/104-8946945-3423112?v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
Austin is more fun than Dallas.
Debeers will be fighting this sort of thing tooth and nail garunteed. Just like the media industry changing the way music is distributed, Debeers will fight the new revolution in diamond technology. They've done a frightenly good job of doing so for the last 100 years already.
Bah, I'm more concered about the reverse being true. You know, like when semiconductors will show amazing potential as a superior diamond. Because it's a hell of a lot cheaper to give my girlfriend a chip than a diamond ring. And just because you're not using diamonds doesn't mean you can't differentiate on the value. The slick executive types will propose with dual Athlons, while the poor struggling college student will have to resort to a 6502 or something.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Yeah, and that's one semiconductor that isn't going to crack.
Diamonds are forever after all.
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
good thing I asked my husband for a Sapphire ring rather than a diamond... :)
I thought about getting Mrs. Claus one of these fake diamonds as an engagement ring stone, but then I thought about what I was saying by doing such a thing. Is my love for her just a facsimile of true love? Though chemically and physically the manufactured diamond is identical to a mined diamond, there is the lingering feeling that it is somewhat untrue to the spirit of diamonds. It is a perfect, fake diamond.
I didn't want to have that sort of guilt hanging over my head, so I didn't go with the cheaper diamond.
I decided to buy her a cheapy cubic zirconium instead.
(dramatization)
This is the only way I know how to say I love you.
*gets down on one knee*
*hands over diamond semiconductor based super-computer*
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
For years, we've heard about semiconductors the size of human hairs and how it would revolutionize the computing world.
I still see an AMD chip in my computer, and nice, large visible chips in the stores.
So now it's diamonds? I'm not trying to troll, but when will mainstream applications (see: desktop computers, or at least universities) come around? Until we see anything, it's all theoretical, and all subject to just being vaporware.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
I can tell my wife that she should let me a new 3 carat Radeon 18000 Pro for our anniversary? I mean, it has diamonds, after all.
I'm so pleased. Really really pleased. Aside from furthuring the hopes and dreams of everyone's favorite science fiction writer, this has a real potential for curbing South African violence. Call me liberatarian, but much like the pending legalization of all controlled substances (I can dream can't I?), a potential for cheap diamonds could destroy any black market demand for our little carbon friends.
Diamond, it turns out, is a geek's best friend.
Yes, that's the only way geeks can get a date...
Signatures are supposed to be funny?
but I want my diamond car already!!!
So can I get her a computer instead of a ring? It would work out so well...
The coolest voice ever.
The new Ad from deBeers.
A new company has challenged the chip manufacturing industry to bring out the cutting edge technology to a floundering economy. They have been in the business of sealing many a relationship to a doomed divorce before but now see a chance to extend their reach both ways. DeBeers recently announced that they would enter the market to manufature Semi-conductor chips after recent innovations touted diamond as a superior material then silicon. Guess diamonds are the new best friends of the geek.
I better stop and give others a chance...
There's an article with more information on using diamonds as superconductors. If the techniques for this hold with these artificial diamonds, we could be seeing a great leap forward in computing power within the next few years.
Karma: Oldschool
Look out Master P, you aint the only one with some bling, bling..............
There are a bunch of problems that using a diamond substrate for semiconductors would pose. I mean for one thing, not being a metal but instead a crystal, the resistance to currents is magnitudes greater than for silicon. I agree the thermal properties are grea, but can the other issues be resolved? Long way off folks.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
I've been waiting for this for years. I want to get my girlfriend a diamond ring (even if the concept of 'traditionalism' was manufactured, a diamond ring sends a cultural message that I wish to buy into), but I refuse to buy from anything that might have been touched by DeBeers. Now I can get a high-quality diamond, and be certain that no 14 year old Sierra Leone girls had their hands cut off to get it to me.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
I don't want to give away too much in the way of spoilers.
In Response to the famous /. proposal.
Kathleen, I bet you are kicking yourself for giving in so soon now!
(with apologizes to CmdrTaco)
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
They mentioned about mass production, but who would write the opcodes/operands for this chip? Would it be x86 compatible or PPC or would it be tottally different?
I'm not an engineer or anything, but let me step out on a limb and suggest that the material with which semiconductors are made has exactly jack shit to do with what instruction set the processor uses.
How the fuck did this get modded to "Interesting"?
What a fucking dumbass.
...unless it gots the bling.
Since Debeers owns every diamond mine in the world.
Poor Africans it's thier land but Debeers owns every Diamond producing mine on earth.
Contrary to popular belief diamonds are not rare, Ruby's and Emeralds are more scarce.
Hopefully this will break the diamond cartel permenantly. I can't wait for diamonds to become like salt. Hard to believe the romans actually paid soldiers with salt. Now everyone will have diamonds cheaply, and western culture can wonder about all that brainwashing they've endured thinking that investing in a diamond ring was worth it.
So what ? I'll just bury some coal and build my own compis when it morphes to diamond...
Words are the ones' weapon and the others' last resort.
diamonds are not really forever
at the bottom there is a link to the next part...
You can't handle the truth.
Read the article.
This company makes the material. It's similar to the guys who make silicon wafers now. They won't design chips, they will just sell carbon to both Intel and Motorola (or whoever is around at the time).
They're not really rare. As the article states, Debeers has a stockpile and controls the supply ruthlessly with tactics that makes Microsoft look like reasonable.
They pretty much ignored an antitrust judgement, have been held responsible for untold exploitation of black African minors, and have been accused of much worse. In the article, one of the interviewees recalls and indirect death threat and treats the journalist with suspicion, fearful that he is an agent of Debeers.
Yes, ladies, we know they look pretty. They may also be more responsible for more terrorism than drugs, certainly more than Bush/Ascroft would like you to beleive.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Karma: Oldschool
"These are cubic zirconium?" Weingarten says without much hope.
"No, they're real," I tell him. "But they were made by a machine in Florida for less than a hundred dollars."
Weingarten shifts uncomfortably in his chair and stares at the glittering gems on his dining room table. "Unless they can be detected," he says, "these stones will bankrupt the industry."
Would it be too far-fetched to draw an analogy to the RIAA getting bankrupt because of the Internet?
I read this story earlier today, and i can already tell that 90% of the above posters havent read it.
If they did they would know that these are manufactured diamonds using relativly new processes that allow for some large diamonds.
Being manufactured they are rather cheap. The jewel grade stones will be sold at about half fo what debeers is selling thier diamonds for.
The big falacy about diamonds is that they are scare. They are, in fact, in great abundance but most of the world's supply is controlled by Debeers. They trickle diamonds onto the market keeping the price artificially high.
To summarize.
1. We can now make great looking diamonds for cheap. (2 different methods of doing so)
2. They can be formed into anything from gemstones to about 4 inch wide(so far) diamond wafers.
3. There are 2 forms of doping in the process of creating the diamonds that allows for + and - parts (couldnt think of the word) that means we now have the building blocks of logic for diamond based chips.
The big point behind putting chips on diamonds is that diamonds are the best known conductors of heat. That means that the chip can be severely cranked up without melting.
The idea is to sell gemstones until they can start making semiconductor blanks. The diamonds will be comparatively cheap, since the vast majority of the cost to produce the diamonds is fixed.
As to DeBeers, I'm sure they'll come up with some marketing angle. Personally, after taking a university honors course in gemology, I learned that the way to tell the difference twixt 'real' and 'fake' gemstones was the 'real' ones were full of crap. The very most expensive of the 'reals' merely approached the purity of the 'fakes'.
Of course, it isn't true love unless you've spent thousands on the rock. The composition of the rock itself doesn't matter (except for the all-important crap to show it's 'real'), it's how much debt you're willing to incurr to show your love.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
And be ready to suffer the consequences.
"Intel's top materials executives weren't aware of the latest research breakthroughs when I spoke to them in June, although they certainly understood the potential for diamonds in computing. "Diamonds represent a seismic change in semiconductors," says Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, Intel's director of communications circuits research. "It takes us about 10 years to evaluate a new material. We have a lot of investment in silicon. We're not about to abandon that.""
What does this say to you? Here's what it says to me:
"We're Intel, and we follow tradition like companies such as Kraft; we don't realize at all that unlike making cheese, if we're going to follow Morris's law of increase and doubling performance, we have to make leaps of faith into other shit like diamonds."
In other words, they're going to stick with silicon until the last second when they're ready to go out of business due to the fact that everyone else is using diamonds.
I can already hear the AMD fans screaming in laughter and happieness.
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
You know what happen now don't you. IT professionals are gonna be stereotyped with Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd...
If I were this guy, I'd be replacing my teeth with diamonds, having bowls of diamonds for cereal, and having a diamond answer my telephone. Sure beats having mining monkeys.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
-cp-
No seriously though, one of my undergrad profs, who works in quasi-crystals, said he wouldn't ever attempt to make diamonds in the lab, because DeBeers would want his head.
"noticed that, can't spell.. that is why I suck programing."
The OSS Community welcomes you!
No! Don't put me away! I'll give you diamonds. Everybody wants diamonds! Diamonds will make everything all better! Diamonds! DIAMONDS!
It is unclear, at best, whether or not diamond has any advantages for mainstream processing. Just because diamond has higher thermal conductivity doesn't mean that it can magically solve all of our problems...without knowing what kind of carrier mobilities can be acheived you can't conclude anything. It might turn out that diamonds are actually far worse than silicon for processing applications. And then there are all of the potential fabrication problems. The lack of good dopants. The lack of a stable native oxide (instead of silicon dioxide, you have carbon dioxide...). How are you going to etch 10nm features into diamond? The article talks of a lack of interest from mainstream companies like Intel. I would take this as a very bad sign for diamond processors...with the scope of Intel/IBM/AMDs research efforts, if they're not looking into something, then its probably not worth researching. Diamonds might have some very useful applications in optical devices...but don't expect to see them inside your desktop computer.
*starts singing* A kiss on the RAM might be quite unconventional, but diamonds are a geek's best friend!
What does a semiconduct0r have to do with computer science?
Is this some sort of MCSE IT bullshit?
instead of a nice ring for our wedding day, I am going to buy you a 1.5 carat computer. Honey... where are you going. Wait! Come Back!
First, I'd like to give a shout out to Stephen R Donoldson for his vision of using diaomand-based computer chips. I would give a small fortune for the silicon-on-diamond write-once memory he described in The Gap Cycle...
But the question remains, what manufacturing infrastructure and process changes will we need to see before the Intel Diamondiun (ad naseum) goes to market?
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Women get diamond rings. Men get diamond processors. Sounds fine to me!
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
Stop turning /. into a Wired repeater service.
The Diamond age has a specific denotation (at least to avid Stephenson readers): The ability to make whatever nanotech stuff you can imagine. (E.g. windows of pure diamond, because they're cheaper. Stadium sized diamond vases as part of a molecular collector, etc..)
While this is a nice first step, they have yet to demonstrate convincing rod-logic or Matter Compiliers. Bah.
Call me when you can hook a feed up into my house.
Diamond conducts heat about 5x better than copper. Maybe one day crazy overclockers can have diamond waterblocks or heatsinks cooling their diamond-wafer processors :).
My server
...for THE next breakthrough, that is going to revolutionize the world in a million different ways... this is it.
...been following this tech for over a decade now, from the first rumors out of the Soviet Union in the eighties... talk of depositing layers of pure, perfect diamond on everything from razor blades to car doors... can 'grown' spacecraft hulls be far behind?
To produce diamonds in the way described, has to be equated with something as momentous as the invention of the laser...
And, of course, the implications for the semiconductor industry boggle the mind... this will have an infinitely larger impact on computing than all but the most miraculous breakthrough in photolithography...
Breaking DeBeers and their monopoly is a nice bonus too...
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
:b:
Look at the periodic table.
Silicon is in the same family as Carbon (same column)
As indicated by Mendeleev, the creator of the periodic table, elements in the same family share the same properties.
Carbon and Silicon share the ability to form chains of arbitrary length...this property gets weaker as you travel down the family, from infinite chains (Carbon) to max of 10 (silicon)
It only follows, naturally, that if silicon is an "okay" semiconductor, just as it is at forming repeating chains, that carbon, which forms better chains, would also be a better semiconductor.
Diamonds are just a pure carbon with a special crystal structure...so, of course, they should be semiconducting. Graphite may be also, following the same logic.
No, they are semiconductors; (Semiconductors in chips are also grown, and have a crystalline structure), thus only work when doped. Same with Diamonds. Either read the article, or don't rain on a parade that you don't understand.
"If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," he says, during an interview at council headquarters on the Hoveniersstraat in Antwerp. "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week."
Not to knock on anybody's wife, but how many diamond-recipients can so much as ballpark an estimate on how a natural diamond is created? Or more specifically related to the article, how long it takes...
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
(some aluminum facts)
I read the dead-tree version of this article last week. The prediction is not just making small gems and computer chips, but huge, pure, industrial quantities soon. Despite anything that De Beers tries to do, if chemically and structurally identical diamonds can be made, natural diamonds will collapse in value. Aluminum certainly didn't retain its value.
As to the price of chips made from diamonds, market forces will determine the fair price (and drive costs inexorably downward.) The major cost of a Silicon-based chip is not the Silicon, but the processing needed to make it function. The same will soon be true of Diamond based chips. Undoubtably there will be a steep learning curve in making diamond chips, so Silicon has at least a decade of safely being number one. Gallium Arsenide is considered superior to Silicon in many ways, but has only unseated Silicon in certain high frequency, low power, telecommunication applications. Diamond-based chips will probably infiltrate niche markets first, where price of fabrication is not a major deterrent.
Letter To Iran
You are an asshole piss off
May I refer you all to this?
A buddy of mine did design work on their pressure vessels and his father's company, Fluitron, made them. I first heard about them a year ago when I was asked if I wanted a deal on some diamonds. Very cool stuff! You can get a beautiful stone and bypass DeBeers completely.
When you RTFA, you will see that De Beers is in the same position as the RIAA...
I'm very curious how they were able to dope Carbon with Boron and create a N type semiconductor. P makes since, since Boron is just to the left from Carbon on the periodic table. However, as far as I know, one always has to go to the next column on the right to make an N type semiconductor, like doping Silicon with Phosphorus.
I'm very curious to find out how they did the trick with Boron.
As monopolies go, which one is the worst? Debeers or Microsoft? I get the impression that its Debeers, but I am not an expert in the diamond industry so I cannot compare.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
But then again you can also see the pure honesty among people at this point
For a person to use the diamond as a semiconductor you'd have to inject impurities in it to get it to conduct, since diamond is a natural insulator.
If these two companies were truly serious about promoting the computer industry they would get into talks with De Beers and say, "Look, fund our shit and we'll only make impure diamonds to allow for semiconducting/manufacturing"
and De Beers should be smart enough to reply "Sure, your family will never have to work again"
And this would be an incredible deal because
1. You can't exactly melt your semiconductors down to get em diamonds =)
2. It's a win win for everybody, De Beers still gets it's diamond industry, and we get our diamond CPUs.
3. And if you can REALLY convince your gf/wife to wear a flat chip regardless of what material it's made of on her finger all the time, then you truly are a pimp.
..by the way the DeBeers cartel has a stranglehold on the Diamonds and how their artificial price manipulation has caused:
1. The death and maiming of many an African(yes.. DeBeers might not be the direct cause but at best it's 51% not.. 49% yes.)
2. Women to go insane in their mock penis sizing contest.
3. The Application of all this money(and power) to the Diamond mechants favorite causes.
I truly hope that the price of Diamonds falls to dozens of dollars per carat, instead of thousands.
For all those which think diamond are rare and precious, well let us put it that way, I am pretty sure somebody can fish out links about all that is "fishy" about debeers.
Now for all those that thinks that diamond made computer stuff will be expansive, let me put it that way. Natural diamond won't be used. Industrial grown one will be used. How are they made ?
Well here is the process we used, 10 years ago, I think it may have been perfectionned, but the basic is probably the same.
* First you seed the surface of where you want to grow diamond with diamond pulver (we used silicium waffer put in a liquid with low frequency vibration and diamond powder). * then you put it in the middle of a Plasma oven (ours was a simple micro wave 10KW half spherical. i am speaking of industrial/labor microwave here). * At this point various technic is created to make the plasma (there is a lot of litterature here available. just search plasma physic). Ours was H2 gas with about 1 to 5% CH4 gas, with a plasma of 6Kilo K (IIRC...). * wait a bit (hours).
Et Voila ! Your microscopic diamond pulver grew in size and if logn enough make a nice shiny surface diamond. Ok it might not look as good as what your GF wants, but good enough for industrial application in the diamond age.
By the way, there was a slight yellowish hue, visible if you compared side by side in full light with a white paper screen behind a natural one and a industrial one. This was due to carbon inclusion which were not tetrahedrical crystalin. I dunno if the technic perfectionend in 10 years...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Wrong, says Jef Van Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council, the official representative of the diamond industry in Belgium. "If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," he says, during an interview at council headquarters on the Hoveniersstraat in Antwerp. "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week."
I invite Mr Van Royen to visit his local pawn shop.
-R
I thought everyone was going to try to make chips that run cooler and use less power, instead of continuing down the "faster = more power = more heat" path of doom.
Using diamond would make heat less of an issue, but unless it can also run with less energy, we're only saving by not having to run powerful fans every time we boot up.
It sure beats the hell out of buying the real deal from DeBeers. I'm not really into the whole child labor and enslavement of whole towns that DeBeers doesn't seem to want to stop. I hope their market crashes down around them--it'll serve 'em right for sure.
NMG
2. They can be formed into anything from gemstones to about 4 inch wide(so far) diamond wafers.
Nope. 10 millimeters so far.
From page 4 of the article:
At the moment, the company is producing 10-millimeter wafers but predicts it will reach an inch square by year's end and 4 inches in five years.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
Diamond is the only gem that's still worth anything (thanks to De Boer's monopoly). With the advent of the internet, virtually anyone can order other gems directly from Thailand and the like. Sapphire and ruby prices have crashed as a result. You can get a 1 carat pigeonblood ruby for just $10 or so nowadays.
And that's not counting advances in synthetic gemstones. Hydrothermal processes for sapphire, ruby and emerald have made it virtually impossible to detect a good quality gem (most synthetic sapphire and ruby is still grown the old way though, which is easier to detect).
I personally have a roughly 10+ carat white sapphire heart and a top blood red ruby of about the same size, both synthetic. I paid about $10 each for them, including the .925 sterling silver pendant setting.
In context, natural gems like these, a few decades back, would be worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
now i'll have to make sure the cpu is really a diamond before i can overclock it?
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
"In its long history, De Beers has ... and contended with Australian, Siberian, and Canadian diamond discoveries."
If DeBeers really inflates the price significantly, what is stopping those Australians Canadians and Russians from selling at lower price?
Granted that deBeers should be out of business, what would that do to the South African economy? The conflict diamonds farther north, if devalued, will be a great blessing to the populations there. But in South Africa being a diamond miner is actually a relatively high-paying job, in the most Westernized black-majority democracy in the world. What portion of South Africa's economy - both employment and foreign income - currently depends on deBeers? This could be the equivalent of somebody foreign coming up with something that would obsolete the American auto industry. Thus it may not just be deBeers' own agents to watch out for - there's a strong national interest about to be trampled here. Not that I'd advise or expect the synthetics makers to pull back ... yet friends in high military positions may be just what they need.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
They are listing numbers like $5/carat (1ct should be enough to make a processor chip... certainly 2 or 3 cts is).
If anything, this might actually be cheaper than silicon by the MHz, thanks to its superior semiconductor and insulating properties and higher thermal conductivity.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
So nano tubes are made from carbon...diamonds are made from carbon. leads to the question it is possible(read laws of physics not engineering) to make diamond nano tubes? from what i remember, what makes a diamond a diamond is the structure of the atoms. So my question...are diamond nano tubes some crazy thing i thought of on my own?
Was Aiming for first post, that didn't just say "FIRST POST!!" that is the real reason for the spelling error, and I can't spell to save my life..
-=You might be a geek if your computer is worth more than your car=-
Screw the 1970's, in the new millenium, we'll all have the real mccoy.
Sorry DeBeers.
This is my sig.
You know, you pretty much answered your own question - Debeers is the diamond industry, that's why you are not an expert in regards to it.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
on NOVA a few years back..
It dealt with the technology behind these diamond presses.
As I remember, they were still having trouble with microscopic CO2 bubbles being trapped in the formed diamonds, which made the product pretty much worthless.
Pretty cool how much the process has improved.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
If you ever see a top white diamond next to a Moissanite, you'd swear the diamond was glass. The Moissanite is almost blinding.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
"Here's one for you, one for you, one for you... etc." "Your next payday is in 6 months, and don't go spending it all in one place!"
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
As far as De Beers is concerned, I hope this devistates them - they practically invented Apartheid single-handedly. I hope in the future they're all picking "old" diamonds out of scrap computers for the recycling value like aluminum cans.
This is the best Democracy money can buy?!?!?
Other than semiconducters, would you do several/hundreds of layers of diamond to make a vest that could stop a point blank fired weapon? What about a diamond thread for clothing that would never tear and that could insulate better than nakedness. Or fill my walls with diamond instead of fiberglass. Or other things to that effect.
Gone would be the days of chipping your Athlon core because of those damn huge thermaltake orbs!
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
I gave my wife an aquamarine engagement ring rather than a diamond. Our choices were between aquamarine and emerald and, in our opinion, both look better than diamond. We are also opposed to paying an inflated price for diamond and supporting the African wars.
Nate
Get both thumbs outa yer azzwhole, byteboyz, stuff in that Twinkee and go back to swilling Jolt ... you really, really do not count any more.
Since artificial diamonds are so cheap does anybody know any places to buy them? And I heard once that you could have large things like windows such as those from deep-sea submersibles made entirely out of artificial diamonds. Are those buyable too for cheap?
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
Carter Clarke, 75, has been retired from the Army for nearly 30 years, but he never lost the air of command. When he walks into Gemesis - the company he founded in 1996 to make diamonds - the staff stands at attention to greet him. It just feels like the right thing to do. Particularly since "the General," as he's known, continually salutes them as if they were troops heading into battle. "I was in combat in Korea and 'Nam," he says after greeting me with a salute in the office lobby. "You better believe I can handle the diamond business."
Call me a patriot, but I am impressed by the hardass, American businessman standing up to the entrenched, monopoly vendors. Here is free market at its best, with visionaires taking risk on new technologies, betting the farm on being the first in a new market. It will be interesting to see if both companies can co-exist, if one will knock the other out, or if DeBeers will call out Leon on both of them.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
DeBeers executives offered their condolences...
Back when I worked at Commonwealth Scientific in High School, some of our customers were using ion-beam sputtering to lay up diamond films on turbine blades.
They'd use two guns, one to sputter the carbon onto the surface they wanted coated, and the other to etch the target so that any carbon that didn't land perfectly in the diamond lattice would get knocked off.
I don't recall how much time it took to grow the films, but I know it took a whole lot of power for many days.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Every single month, I look forward to getting my copy of Wired. I don't look forward to seeing the same stories posted on Slashdot one or two days afterward. It doesn't really excite me.
But Canadian Polar Bear diamonds are mined up in North America, are of a high-quality cut, and are becoming both more popular and more available (as production ramps up).
It's exciting and interesting that they're getting better at this process but we're not on the verge of any sort of leap here. 'The General' is talking about selling the diamonds for 50% less to wholesalers at the cheapest which isn't exactly a discount rate. He's no anarchist or freedom loving slashdot user, he's in it for the cash, nothing else.
If 'The General' and Bryant Linares survive the next few years, both physically and metaphorically (in that their companies continue to operate), we'll see a couple of big diamond barons instead of one.
I don't know if anyone has noticed but competetion in this system doesn't exactly lead to things being priced reasonably compared to their production costs. Hate to haul out the economic theory on y'all but this ain't no adam smith world.
I figure Apollo and Gemesis will just quietly shut down. I think De Beers will find 'ways of persuading them'.
Man, just imagine a diamond-bottom frying pan! Perfectly non-stick, and the most even heating possible.
I want it. Now.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
PBS had a special on this back in 2000. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/diamond/
It looks like the big breakthrough is the CVD technique. The old Russian design had the problem of letting in too much nitrogen and creating only yellow diamonds. They have improved the technique but it is still harder to make clear diamonds. I read that they were going after the colored market since colored natural diamonds are more expensive. Plus it must be easier to add color with new elements than remove all the yellow. (They can add different elements to get different colors.) Expect the market in colored diamonds (especially yellow) to get cheap. (Kobe should have waited...) Of course the real volume is in clear diamonds. Hopefully the CVD technique can make cheap clear diamonds. I know they said $5 a carat, but I wouldn't trust Wired.
Chris Mesterharm
Screw Diamonds as processors.
I want diamonds as a case.
I'm tired of all these pansy ass sheetmetal cases that bend and deform. All those screws that get stripped and never again will leave their place.
I see a future where entire cases are made from diamonds. Shining a brilliant blue from the internal neon tubes.
Once the lock is engaged no amount of brute force will open it. It will stand there impervious to the attacks of even the most frustrated luser. Taunting them with its serene glow.
Will the markets open up to more african diamonds to lower osts on this new equipment?
I wonder whether some options trading to take advantage of a (hopefully) impending crash in the diamond market is appropriate here. I suppose it'll take a few years, which AFAICT is beyond the horizon of most options trading, isn't it?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
All the other good points about diamond semiconductors aside, the most important point for me would be the implied lack of pollutants created during the manufacturing process. The silicon chip manufacturing process create enormous amounts of poison that has to be disposed of in some way. Diamond seems to require methane, carbon, and electricity.
Another aspect about this: Intel says they have an enormous investment in silicon that they won't abandon soon. Excellent market opportunity! IBM, Motorola, anyone out there that wants to duck under Intel's commitment to their plant, and make a very profitable (and clean) revolution happen?
But the property of silicon that makes it chip worthy is not so much that of silicon, but that of silicon oxide (i.e. beach sand), that makes a perfect insulating end cap on the silicon crystal that makes the MOSFET possible. GaS has some other kind of FET they need to contend with, and as for diamond, oxides of carbon are gasses, so I don't know what they have in mind there.
Buckingham Palace
Official Press Release
Crown Jewels Stolen
Late this afternoon, Her Majesty's crown jewels have mysteriously disappeared. Scotland Yard is looking for a man known only as "Cowboy Neal". It is believed that Cowboy Neal's new Athlon XP system was overheating due to his constant websurfing and "frist prosting", he needed a large supply of large diamonds to cool his cpu. Industry expert Joshua Davis has this to say. "Not only is it the hardest substance known, it also has the highest thermal conductivity - tremendous heat can pass through it without causing damage." A source from AMD also comments, "The current line of Athlon XP processors each expend 1.5 million BTUs (British Thermal Units) of heat per nanosecond of usage."
Scotland yard has notified all area McDonalds to be on the lookout for this mysterious character, Cowboy Neal.
The day Wired hits the mailbox - Slashdot starts posting their stories.
I wonder if this is some kind of cross-marketing or just pathetic journalism.
Carbon, is there anyhing it can't do?
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
My first PC, a 486SX 25Mhz ran without a fan or heatsink besides the one in it's 120 Watt power supply. This was back in 1993.
Now, 10 years later, My CPU alone is putting out more heat then my desk lamp, requires a heat sink large enough to require bolting to the computer chasis, and a power supply 4 times that of my 1993 equivelant.
Now I ask you, what is happening here? Nearly every other technology has gotten cooler, and more effcient, yet desktop machines have not. My question is, why?
Is it marketing? Have manufacturers been pushed by competition to push their chips as far as they can possibly go with each generation?
Or has power and heat just been deamed unimportant? Something to be worried about by the integrators and not by the marketing guys? I know it certainly can't be a boon for reliability, but how long is a typical desktop machine expected to last anyway?
Or is there a technical reason? You could design cooler chips by increasing the effciency of each gate. Is the effciency of the gate limited by the process? Or is it just faster and cheaper to shrink the die?
At best, food for thought. At worse, a mere rant.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
Vast stockpiles isn't all. There are beaches in South Africa that are littered with diamonds. And if you try to go onto those beaches: a bullet in your back. De Beers is more evil than OPEC.
You are off my Christmas card list.
Carbon in diamonds is conductive but only weakly so. Other gemstones are iconic crystals (frequently Al2O3) which by nature would be nonconductive. BTW, carbon in graphite form is single planar conductive. It conducts along one axis but insulates in the perpendicular direction.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Cheap manufactured diamonds are nice for the computer age, as well as for fighting the next world war. The only problem arises when our brave scientists try to get the diamonds, and angry gray gorillas attack them! I knew Crichton had something cooking when he wrote that book Planet of the Apes.
Interesting article, but it's missing some of the point. There are two issues here: fabricating substitute "gem" diamonds for jewelry, or fabricating diamond for the semiconductor industry..., or diamond coatings for wear resistance, biocompatible implants, etc. These are an entirely different beast.
CVD diamond, even in with the best of reactors, is limited by growth rates. Working with thin films is, at the moment, the only way to go. You can also only get single crystal diamond by growing on a previously obtained single crystal diamond- as they mention in the article. This is seriously limiting, and they don't mention the growth rates in the article. 5$ a carat is such a BS guess it's not even funny.
CVD diamond grown primarly on Si wafers, and on some specially coated Si wafers, is the way diamond (which is polycrystalline, with different grain sizes giving very different diamond properties) is going to be used in the near to far future. Our group just got a RD 100 award (not that I give that much creedence to those, but it's recognition) for coating 4" wafers with diamond, and we're going up to 8" next year.
The biggest problem is with the electronic properties of the diamond. Sure, it's a great thermal conductor. But... ahem.. it also needs to be a great electical conductor- and have decent mobilities- to be used in actual electronic devices. You can dope diamond with boron to make it p-type, but the conductivity isn't all that high, and the mobility even less, in polycrystalline diamond due to defects and grain boundaries, etc. We've made n-type nanocrystalline diamond with nitrogen, which shouldn't work, but does, and we're still trying to figure out the conduction mechanism.
Thin film diamond is really going to shine for a few particular uses- MEMS (it has extremely low friction/stiction/wear), bio-devices, chemically resistant devices, etc. In all of these cases, even conductive MEMS driven by diamond electronics, borderline and not great electronic properties are fine. (Think Si TFT's for your comptuer display- it's not single crystal Si, obviously, but still has a great potental for other uses.)
There is no way to dope single crystal n-type. People are trying very hard to do this. Some people think they have gotten phosphorous to work slightly, but the growth is very difficult, and the work hard to reproduce. (our doping probably occurs in the grain boundaries, and we think we have actual grain boundary conduction vs. traditional doping processes.) That is a far bigger barrier than just growing BIG DIAMONDS. This article is just some PR spin press release that doesn't really say anything. (As I get more jaded, I see that that is all they really ever are). Just because you can't make Intel processors out of diamond doesn't mean you can't utilize diamond for a large number of exciting applications.
Remember: bigger is not better. Although I personally do like the idea of freaking out DeBeers.
Pull me a diamond boule, and I"ll be impressed.
-j, postdoc at your favorite national lab.
Hello
I'm just surprised or maybe worried, where's AMD on this story?
I mean, Intel it's big but for some people (me!) AMD have better technology than Intel, why this reporter from Wired didn't ask to AMD?
Any comments?
One wonders what this will do to the South African economy, where De Beers has some large mines. Still, I prefer taking the wind out of this artificial scarcity. Now if only the oil alternatives were more economically viable (Euphorbia lagascae, et cetera)...
-am
As a geek/technologist, i like at the "real" diamond in one hand, and the synthesized diamond on the other, and think sure, the "real" diamond is kind of cool, it was formed under impressive conditions and has usefull, interesting, and pretty properties. However the syntehsized diamond, we _made_ that. Humans made a machine in a lab that can do what takes Nature a few million tons of 2,2000 degree magma to do. THAT is impressive.
Even if they were the same price i would be tempted to go with the synthesized diamond, just out of pride for the human race. The fact that the synthesized one would likely be orders of magnitude cheaper just sweetens the deal.
And on top of that, as a geek i pay enough attention to realize what an evil company DeBeers is, that a lot of the price of a "natural" diamond is artificially inflated, and in at least some cases, possibly a lot of them, there's a lot of blood that goes into extracting the diamond and delivering it to where i could purchase it.
Finally, a few years back i remember seeing a tv show that was talking about synthesized gemstones, back when they were doing it with emeralds and rubies and such and still trying to get diamonds working. Some or all of the companies, and i don't remember if this was voluntary, or if the gemstone industries got some kind of law passed, added traces of certain chemicals to the gemstones so that they would glow if you shined certain frequences of light on them.
Now that is a marketing gimick just waiting to happen. "New synthetics diamonds! 10 times the quality for one tenth of the price! Not only are you not supporting African dictaorships if you buy from us, our diamonds glow in the dark under blacklight! How cool is that?!"
Of course another benefit of this might be that if diamond prices crash, we might stop seeing so much jewelry that's been diamond encrusted. Because of both the percieved and monetary value, jewelers seem to find it hard to resist scattering little (or large!) bits of diamond on just about any piece of jewelry they produce. This obviously increases the price (and thus the markup) and apparently a lot of people think they look better that way. Rings are especially prone to this problem. Personally i don't think diamonds are that attractive, and it annoys me that every time my girlfriend wants a present, i have to wade through about nine saphire and diamond rings/bracelets/whatever for each plain saphire item, which is usually both more attractive and cheaper.
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The whole jewelry industry may be severely impacted by this, may even collapse. Namibia and South Africa will most likely see their unemployment rates (already high) skyrocket. Unemployment shoots up high enough, these nominally stable countries may be pushed to the brink. The Skeleton Coast, however, may unrestricted, since the chief concern is diamond mine security. Pawn shops specializing in jewelry will see their inventories lose value quickly. No more hocking sentimental diamond jewelry to pay off credit cards/mortgages/bar tabs. Short selling DeBeers' ADRs may be a great way to make some quick cash.
Finally the slashdot crowd has a chance to get girlfriends!
Just remember to get married before the rest of the world hears about this!
Considering the Na+ is necessary for nerve function, and I think salt is much maligned. Other than it is added to too many things in most people's diet, it is necessary for life... and if I was in ancient times I'd rather be paid in salt than have to drink the Spartan's "black broth" (animal blood mixed with vinegar -yuck).
On the Sci-Fi channel they had this movie and it showed that the people of atlantis used diamonds for everything. even for turning people into half man/half bull creatures and for brainwashing people. I forget the name and point of the movie, but I do believe Atlantis eventually blew up.
Is it a rule that the Wired cover story will be posted as a Slashdot story about two weeks after subscribers get their copies?
Now I know how to get Slashdot to post one of my stories! Just wait... only 21 more days till the next issue........
Diamond electronics will probably happen, especially given the recent discovery of a way to make n-type material with high activity levels. http://www.nature.com/DynaSearch/App/DynaSearch.ta f?sp_k=NMAT&_Action=Search&search_fulltext=n-type+ diamond&search+nature+materials.x=0&search+nature+ materials.y=0
Realistically, this will take at least 10 years to bring to production. A nearer-term use of diamond is close to coming on the market. This is is heat spreaders to move heat away from processors more efficiently. A small diamond heat spreader (1" x 1" x 0.5mm thick) between the die and the heat sink (a) reduces the hot spot and (b) reduces the thermal impedance between the die and heat sink so much that you can kick clock rates up by 50% or more. So, one of the new Apple 2 GHz G5s could run at 3GHz with just a drop-in diamond heat spreader in the processor package. Diamond's thermal conductivity is up to 500% that of copper. Key thing is the cost - there is a company that is developing new tech for making diamond at less than 20cents/carat - essential for high volume industrial applications. Expect some announcements Q1 2004. Let's just say everyone but Intel will be very, very happy.
I think diamond-based semiconductors will be less prone to damage from EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse).
My HighSchool physics teacher (who also taugh AP Chemistry) said he had a student that had figured out a way to make industrial (black) diamonds inexpensively using a tank of compressed Methane and a plasma cutter. The tank was emptied and the head of the plasma cutter is mounted inside and sealed. All air is forced out and replaced with methane. The pressure is raised to about 1000 psi and the plasma cutter is turned on. After a period of time the inside of the gas cylinder is covered in black diamond crystals about the size of grains of sand. This is almost exactly the same method used by Apollo Diamond in the story.
While photovotaics don't overheat, does anyone know if these diamonds could make a decent substitute for silcon photovoltaic cells? Is the manufacturing process cheaper? Would they be more efficient?
Microsoft is a kid learning in the monopoly game. Imagine them buying arms to insure that India invades Pakistan with the promise of a law to force Windows on all PC in both countries. That's what is going on in the Diamond industry. (I hope Bill is not reading this).
I am hoping for years that artificial diamonds floods the market.
I saw in a documentary in 1997. The color is what they could not remove (mainly yellow).
But still the Diamond industry (read De Beers with 98% of the world market for jewelry diamonds, 75% of total market by value) was trying to push hard to make these "illegal", by forcing some laser markings in the factory, permit to produce and all kinds of hurdles. When it failed (totally impractical, and government don't give a F about De Beers), they thought about marking their own "natural" diamonds, but that would mean loosing the huge market of illegal/smuggling diamond rings, and the best money laundering system in the world with strong ties to arms smuggling (and a lot more).
No way the diamond industry would do that, how would they pay Sierra-Leone and it's neighbors to wage war to insure the flow of diamonds? In the 80's De Beers gave arms to both sides in Sierra-Leone against promises for years of diamond exploitation without tax. No matter who wins, they had their diamonds. The whole geopolitics instability is good for the circulation of diamonds, insuring no local laws (not for long anyway).
The few scandals in the oil market are nothing compared to the diamond industry (except for the amounts of money involved of course). Each time I hear about bringing justice in an oil rich country I think of these African soils "owned" by De Beers, with the population kept in war and poverty for the riches of the De Beers owners.
Note: De Beers are not allowed to do business in the US because of their monopole, but nothing is done to stop the flow of diamonds by De Beers "independent" representatives to cross the border every day from western Canada.
De Beers started the whole and "If he loves you he will buy you a diamond" and "A Diamond is (love) forever" in early 1900. Now people believe that a diamond ring goes down ages back. Not true at all, a gold ring for both husband and bride was the norm.
Being manufactured they are rather cheap. The jewel grade stones will be sold at about half fo what debeers is selling thier diamonds for.
:)
Did it actually give a percentage like that?
Considering that they stated that a 1 carat stone cost them $5 to make... (not from scratch, but ya know, not counting equipment)
Oh, hell, never mind. Not like I'm complaining(lol), and I'm sure they've incurred major costs just in the security area alone. I'm just glad they're developing this type of thing with an eye towards the technology market.
That chemical vapor deposition method sounds rather interesting, as I'm not sure if there would be anything really limiting growth using this. The more surface area you have, the more accumulates, the more usuable material you get. But then, I know pretty much next to nothing about the details of the process or if that would be possible.
Wouldn't it be interesting though if you could produce diamonds the size of bricks with enough facilities and once your seeds get grown large enough though? *laughs* You'd still have your time and accumulation wait, but something like that would just be insane.
Ah well, enough pure speculation. Maybe we'll just have to find something with some real meaning behind it to give to our collective future wives instead of an expensive piece of carbon.
diamonds. Gallium Nitride semiconductor can easily handle the temp and is easier to manufacture than diamond. This article is not credible when it says that diamond will be available for chips in the near future. It's still way to difficult to manufacture.
Diamond has a very high index of refractivity. It's also pretty hard.
A rucksack 'scope with uncoated optics that I could safely clean the objective lens using sandpaper sounds pretty cool. Rugged as all hell and tack sharp in the visual department. I like it!
Is it fascism yet?
Does this mean that we'll start having to apply Moore's law to diamond weights? Will a 4 carat engagement ring in 2 years have the same value of 2 carat engagement ring today?
Using deuterium plasma doping of boron-doped diamond, n-type material with very good activation fraction has been made.
. ta f?sp_k=NMAT&_Action=Search&search_fulltext=n-type+ diamond&search+nature+materials.x=0&search+nature+ materials.y=0
http://www.nature.com/DynaSearch/App/DynaSearch
Things change fast, you gotta keep up with the literature...
... aren't you amazed at the quantity of people who say "Damn de Beers and their blood diamonds! I will never support a company like that!" and are still dressed in Nike shoes, Adidas shorts and t-shirt and Calvin Klein underwear? (I have to admit taking a shot at Calvin Klein is gratuitous and maybe they really do have good working environments, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't)
So I know that Slashdot is just a collection of links to other places, but really, does _every_ story from Wired have to be posted here? Granted this was a little better because it was posted in some proximity to the magazine being published, but don't most of us get Wired? At the very least, can we have a new category for "Wired Repost" so that those of us who do subscribe can filter it out??
Just like NY Times, Wired tends to fatten-up their articles with useless, peripheral info that most readers don't care about. Do we really need to know that they drove a Saab to the secret base/lab? Too much info about Diamond High Council and DeBeers testing machines.i ns,%20M J,%2011-96.htm
The article does not mention WHY cultered diamonds are every color except crystal-clear. DeBeers corp peddles clear diamonds as superior or better when they are no better their yellow-tinted twins. Here's a better article that references early development, has more pictures and answers more questions even though it's from 1996.
http://www.lucentdiamonds.com/Growing%20Pa
Just Google it and you will find tons of info.
My question here is, that you have this chip that will now run at 2k instead of 200 degrees but what the hell are you going to do with the heat? For home users are we going to start seeing dryer vents with firewall protection through the walls to the outside of the house?
I'm running 2 AMD XP 2000+ processors in a 12x12 room and shut the doors and it can be 100 degrees in there quickly. I'm sure it creates enough heat to raise my power bill some also but I have yet come up with a solution. I have planned on venting them out the Window but I have to handle the bug and security problem there at the same time.
A bit of googling turned out this page with pictures of artificial diamond gems, and wafers. Seems like Sumitomo Electric has some wafers larger than the few milimiters mentioned in the article.
I wonder how far along the Japanese are in this research...
Good stuff, but heat is very bad for diamond.
Although most people would never let it worry them, diamonds on the earth's surface aren't forever. Diamonds form at high temperatures and very high pressures inside the earth, but at the earth's surface they're out of equilibrium with their surroundings. They will, slowly, break down and decay. Of course this doesn't happen very quickly, but "forever" is an awfully long time.
Personally, I couldn't care less where a Diamond comes from - it's the same thing whether its a thousand years old and coming from Africa, or if its coming from a lab in Boston or Florida. Ultra-dense carbon that looks pretty, I get it!
DeBeers is one of the worst companies on the planet, I just *hope* they don't go along with the new technology, continue their practices, and go bankrupt (no, not the kind where they continue operations). Hopefully, some of their crimes will catch up with them, legally or otherwise. To all De Beers employees, as soon as a new job opportunity comes up, take it!
Aluminum is also makes up the pyramid atop the Washington monument - at the time it was more precious than gold, partly because there was no refination process, equally because there was no good way to work it.
Be careful what you wish for. If she's not computer savvy, she might get her diamond laced mother on board.
God bless you then.There are no "degrees Kelvin" - just Kelvins. The unit of measurement in the Kelvin scale is the Kelvin.
Rah.
diamonds. Such as the ultimate pair of safety glasses, hell, the yellow tinted diamonds they make now would be perfect for shooting glasses. Or how about using diamonds in telescopes and binoculars? Ultra hard lenses that won't scratch and are more resistant to cracking than current glass lenses. Diamond would also make a bitchin substrate for mirrors for reflector telescopes, the high thermal conductivity means that such scopes would cool down faster for observation that current Pyrex mirrors do.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I can also envision plasmas of beryllium aluminum silicate (beryl) and aluminum oxide (corundum) coupled with the appropriate metallic coloring to make blocks of flawless gemstones like emerald, ruby and sapphire. Only problem here would be that the that the gems would be too flawless... for example, emeralds from Minas Gerais, Brazil are prized because of their pyrite inclusions and liquid-filled gas bubbles, and I doubt if you could randomly deposit iron sulfide on the block and expect it to crystalize. Same applies with corundums; some rubies and sapphires have a star reflection on them, from inclusions of rutile crystals.
I suppose that perfection can be nice, but sometimes nothing beats the real thing.
Sweet Merriam-Webster! I don't care WHERE you get your diamonds, but I hope you marry a grammar teacher to tell you that you WEAR them on you hand.
Actually, if you read the article you would find out that "cultured" diamonds can come in clear as well, they simply take longer to create then a coloured diamond.
The good news is that this will eventually force Debeers out of business. They are one of the most evil companies ever to exist.
It's not all about heat dissipation.
;)
It's about bandgap energy too (Though I concede that the two are related)
IIRC, diamonds at a given temperature are BETTER semiconductors that silicon based ones, since less thermally excited electrons make it to the conduction band.
It's been a long time since I studied this stuff, so it'd be useful for some more knowledgable folks to go right ahead and contradict me
Here's a link for those interested...
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_gap
This application of diamond would allow the chip to dissipate heat more readily, and thus the inevitable result would be to raise the clock rates to the point where the internal heat is where it is now (stopped just before the system would fail), but with a much greater heat release.
So your chip would be the same temperature on the inside, but a helluva lot hotter on the outside.
And if anybody remembers this story, more heat in a notebook computer is a very bad idea.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
Fortunately.
While I'd *love* for this to turn out to be a realistic alternative to silicon, I remain somewhat skeptical. First, can diamond be doped? In order to make a MOSFET on the scale that is found in modern CPUs, we use N-type and P-type silicon as opposed to metal and silicon (MOSFET = metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor.) I don't know if bombarding diamond with arsenic or boron will work how it does with silicon. Second, can diamond be etched? It's quite a bit harder than silicon. I hate to rain on the parade, but everyone was hailing GaAs as the messiah at one point too.
why is going cheap always considered going bankrupt?
... ... ... ... ... ...
... yucky!
just think!
armore pircing diamond tipped missiles
diamond laced armour
CPU in a diamond (?)
ballbearings with round diamonds last forever
drill-bits lasting forever (tunneling/oil-exploration)
etc
serious, a new market! no more afro-american slaving away in a bottomless stinking pit.
there was this horrific natural geografic article a few years ago.
one picture shows this pit about 300-400 meter in diameter and humans like ants digging away. not one maschine all flesh and bone
Also, a waffle.
What do you mean I can't put down a preorder?
Yay me!
silicon melts at 1414 K
diamonds melt at ~4000 K
That's real hot.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Show her you love her by buying her an eternal 3 carat diamond.
And hide the receipt, mmkay?
This could puncture the greatest marketing scam of all time: "prove you love your wife by sending a truckload of your hard-earned money to a bunch of billionaires."
I just wonder, will it be a sign of true love -- or of being a sucker -- to have one of the old high-priced diamonds on your finger in a few years?
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
Oddly absent -- though perhaps not so considering the source is Wired -- is any consideration of the significance of cheap diamond for optics. Diamond has a substantially higher refractive index than glass and is less subject to thermal and mechanical deformation than glass. What that would mean in practice would require a deeper knowledge of optics than I have, but it sure would be interesting to see what kind of lenses and prisms could be made out of it for cameras, telescopes, and microscopes.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Actually Tanzanite is a lot more rare than Diamonds and naturally found in only one place on Earth - Tanzania in central Africa.
Nice blue colour,almost purple.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
So when will petroleum be able to be produced artificially? It's created by heat, pressure, and time as well.
John Kerry is a Joke!
you should go and get yourself done. It can't hurt *that* much =)
I'm scared too though. My foreskin feels really good. Is pussy worth giving up my foreskin? I'm a virgin BTW.
it will be expensive, but arc welding equipment delivers more power routinely. You don't need special powerlines to connect them for the smaller ones, your electric kettle might draw even more.
I wonder what will happen when the first diamond processors become obsolete (yeah diamonds are forever, right). Will they be recycled into jewelry?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
The Debeers already have (access to) perfect 8 Inch mono-crystalline diamond wafers. These were offered for sale for $100,000 and if I recall correctly, CVD.
... them's the deal.
It is my belief that these were monopoly level prices as they seem to not be common (yet) and are the only material that serve for certain tasks. (Such as probing where power levels are high [think heat conducted from probes with transparent backing] and you need to see the target with the possible bonus combination of chemically harsh environments.)
The persons who I spoke with handled and examined this Diamond wafer personally and are in the poly-crystalline diamond wafer and and coating business. They are targeting wafers at $5 / in^2 / mm thick. Because they are not targeting mono-crystalline, their dealings with the Debeers have not been nearly so unpleasant.
Yes, I am being vague
I love diamonds. I really do. Staring into a diamond is like standing in a room full of mirrors. Even uncut diamonds are beautiful - I've got a nice uncut diamond brought back from Africa by a relative generations ago.
But it's always irritated me that the price of diamond has been kept artificially high by DeBeers. Given a choice between an artificial diamonds and an artificial price.... I'll take the artificial diamond.
Besides, it's not as if I'd ever be able tell the differance. Unless of course DeBeers starts supplying a fourier transform infrared spectrometer free with every diamond. Which, as I'm a techie who likes technical toys, is the only thing that would make me cough up the DeBeers premium.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
But seriously, It's that the chip can run hotter, not that it is using more power. Now with a diamond chip, you might not need a heat sink - natural heat radiation will spill off most of the heat.
..........FULL STOP.
I can buy my wife that computer say I got her diamond and make of with a new machine in the end! Mwhaha!
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
You like my watch? It's #135 on the Top 500 Supercomputers chart.
I think design is more important than materials science at this point. Obviously they both have their place, but I'm not convinced cooling is the major obstacle to higher performance computing.
We're already so close to the end of the road in semiconductor design I have to wonder if this is a solution in search of a problem. If we're at a hundred nanometers right now, there's not a hell of a lot of shrinking that can happen before we're dealing with individual atomic bonds as circuits. An Si-Si bond is about a quarter of a nanometer.
One technique is simply to reduce voltage. I understand that you can lose performace by reducing voltage, but is that really a good enough reason to switch from Si this late in the game?
It seems that better System On a Chip or System in a Package designs are more important at this point than materials technology. I tend to agree with the guy from Intel that Si is already quite satisfactory. What sucks is the packaging. Why do we still even have motherboards?
How about a square chip package similar to what we have now, but with a dual DIMM on each side, a VGA out, a USB2 port and two ethernet jacks. Screw all that other crap. I'd rather have five of those running at 1.Ghz each for fifty bucks a pop than a 20Ghz beige monstrosity growling with the strain of its active cooling system that literally melts down every time it gets so full of dust the fan sticks.
Just because you could technically tolerate more system heat within the CPU package with diamond circuitry, I think it's really worth asking if that's where we really should be heading. You've still got to deal with the heat just because it doesn't destroy the CPU doesn't mean it disappears. People are sensitive to heat too.
Then again, there's always cogeneration. Who knows. The home PC becomes the powerplant. That could be intersting too.
I had and threw away some silicon disks (used to make chips) that were discarded originally due to excess fabrication errors.
Substitute diamond for silicon.
Prediction: people will be THROWING AWAY diamonds.
diamondcomputers.com and diamondcpu.com already taken!
Diamonds are IMHO extremely fragile. Would you want to use a glass knife to cut pork? If you are a little bit less than careful it would break and hurt you. If the bottom of a frying pan is fragile you will have a hard time moving stuff around in it. I guess diamond cookware would have the same disadvantages.
What most people don't realise is that the very vast majority of diamonds sold around the world (and hence where the money is to be made) are industrial quality diamonds, not gemstone quality. Industrial diamonds are mostly used as abrasives. Many of the mines in Canada, Australia and Russia produce gem quality diamonds (eg. Argyle pink diamonds from Australia), but most of the industrial diamond deposits are found in Africa.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
was probably :
"Scientists believe that this breakthrough could eventually lead to a cure for cancer"
or
"... lead to an end to world hunger"
or
"... lead to a renewable source of energy"
or
"... computers vastly more powerful than those we have today, rendering our current encrytption techniques useless"
etc.etc.etc.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
One thing that the article and comments here fail to mention is that grown diamonds can be detected due to their more perfect structure, they glow when placed under a UV light source (lumino-fluorescence). natural diamonds have a much less regular structure so glow less than the manufactered diamonds.
Also, De-beers has started to put logos on their diamons so that you are sure you are buing the "real" thing.
Interesting technology though, could be a winner in many different areas of technology I think.
- they just decay on a timescale significantly longer than your marriage.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Well I never said it was fucking silver. It is still conductive while other gemstones aren't, which is why diamond testers work.
Judging from the lenght of the quotes you have troubles understanding what you read.
Linking silicon to biological molecules is interesting because you can make cheap biological sensors linked to digital interface. There are plenty of proteins that can sense the presence of very specific molecules (receptors, immunoproteins) but thus far is has been quite hard to have a non-destructive way to read the output of these molecules. If you can 'glue' these molecules reliably to a silicon substrate and keep them 'working', then you can create very simple but very specific sensors for very many compounds.
Think for instance about a device that can signal if an ovulating woman is nearby. Most animals would sniff at such a device, but most slashdot geeks would find it a very usefull tool to get laid...
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Realize there is no box.
Comparing pre-natal technology with very mature and specialized technology is not the best way to prepare for the future.
Who cares that most machines need round wafers if you don't even know if these machines can be used with this new tech. If it is more economical to use square wafers then there will be machines for square wafers. Most endproduct is square too, so round wafers means more waste anyhow.
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I've always wondered this. Diamond is referred to as inorganic. Organic means "carbon based". What am I missing?
I know, I should have paid more attention in chemistry.
I forget what 8 was for.
OK i'll bite:
_generator_
ever heard of synthesis my dear A/C? creating molecules from other molecules with the help of some nice enzymes? For instance having a glucose->alcohol pathway on a chip and switching it on when you feel so inclined?
It would be much simpler though to wire up the endocrienal glands that create endorfines and stimulate thos when you want to. Or even better stimulating your pleasure centers directly. Orgasm at th etouch of a button.
Yeah I am trailing off....
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Diamond Inside!
Actually, while I agree with your assertation that a degree is an arbitraty point in any scale, the accepted scientific name of the arbitraty points on the Kelvin scale is called the Kelvin. Thus, using the word 'degrees,' or the term 'degrees Kelvin,' may be accurate, but it is not as accurate or concise as saying 'Kelvins.' Besides, you look like a damn fool when you say it wrong, and us cliquish elitists are less inclined to take you seriously because you missed something in the first few weeks of high school chemistry. Sorry, it's not a made-up distinction; that's just the way it is. If you're going to post, don't flame someone for attempting to advance your knowledge to keep you from looking stupid in the future. I'm not sure where you took chemistry, but the units are Kelvins, damnit.
if you can find a broker stupid enough to let you. Or get some long term (5 years) put options.
What do you mean that doesn't exist for diamonds?
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a few years down the road will claim that they patented this process?
Note: This sig contains nine S's, nine I's and five O's which... means absolutely nothing.
...(not sure if this is the case for manufactured diamonds though)
...You're a long way off, dumbass.
Then you shouldn't be commenting on an article speaking of MANUFACTURED DIAMONDS.
And you're overdue for a metaphorical look in the mirror.
Those things are hot already! What will putting a diamond chip into them do? Will scorch marks on your crotch be the new geek fashion?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
After all, this is silicon-carbide. We use this stuff as an industrial abrasive for a reason.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
I think the real key is not simply temperature tolerance, but the fact that diamond is one of the best conductors of heat in existence. Think copper is a good way to get heat from your CPU? Copper is nothing compared to diamond as far as heat conductivity goes.
I've always wondered why semiconductor manufacturers didn't investigate placing a layer of synthetic diamond on top of their finished silicon in order to assist in transferring heat away from it. If used only for heat transfer, there's no need for it to be monocrystalline.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
- Feature Size
- Semiconductor Characteristics (bandgap, intrinsic capacitance etc)
- Clock Distribution
- Temperature
We are attacking this on all fronts. Most people focus on reducing feature size, which is a useful thing but isn't everything. It lets us pack more active devices into the same area, so we can get the same yield from chips with more transistors, and it increases speed and decreases power consumption.Unfortunately, power consumption (and hence dissipation (heat)) is proportional to the clock frequency, so the faster it goes, the hotter it runs.
Semiconductor characteristics are important. Things like how much capacitance there is across an active device make an enormous difference (dynamic power dissipation, which determines the chip's temperature, is proportional to the capacitance of the gates), and silicon is nowhere near the best at this. We already have 10GHz (digital) chips running in Gallium Arsenide or Indium Phosphide processes. Diamond is supposed to be one of the most promising new materials in this area.
Clock distribution is becoming a huge problem, but it's not related to the materials or production capabilities. It's just a limitation of keeping billions of clock signals synchronized across a chip at speeds that cause even the small metal wires on the IC to behave like transmission-lines. On newer chips, up to HALF of the area on the chip is devoted to synchronizing the clock. Advances in asynchronous design are starting to overcome some of these limitations, but that is still a ways away from mainstream.
Finally, temperature. Performance is inversely proportional to the temperature (since, as the temperature rises, so does the propogation delay, and hence the chip has to run at a lower frequency). Since diamond has such a high thermal conductivity, it is possible to mount the wafer upside-down inside the plastic body, with a block of copper (or possibly even more diamond, when the prices drop that much) to draw the heat directly from the core. It's not the ability of diamond to run at higher temperatures that is the important part (although accidents happen, and it's nice to be able to heat your CPU to 300 without killing it). It's the higher thermal conductivity, which makes it easier to dissipate the heat.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
Out of curiosity, where did you order/buy those gems?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It's about clock speed.
If your heat tolerance (and more importantly, your ability to remove heat from the CPU) is higher, then you can ramp up the clock rate. Significantly.
Personally, I think that while the materials themselves can stand the heat, there will be problems maintaining their semiconductor properties at high heat levels. (Already, silicon transistors stop functioning properly LONG before the silicon itself is at risk for melting.) They might work at somewhat higher temps, but probably not that much higher.
The real key will be that the CPU circuitry, if made from diamond, will be made of one of the best heatsink materials known to man. While temperature tolerance might not be improved much, a diamond-based semiconductor could dissipate far more heat while maintaining the same temperature.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This Bryant guy does... I figured Rambus would be all over this one. Probably waiting for the right moment.
Note: This sig contains nine S's, nine I's and five O's which... means absolutely nothing.
Is that the diamond makers are both dreaming of semiconductor applications.
In other words, the synthetic diamond companies have a fallback market.
DeBeers, on the other hand, can't produce diamonds consistent enough for semiconductor use. i.e. they're SOL in a situation like that.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Made in the USA! Support your local diamond manufacturer. :)
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
are a geeks best friend
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These days we make chips on silicon with copper wiring. Copper melts at 1064C, silicon melts at 1414C. Looks like finding an extremely high temperature conductor on par with copper to use for interconnect might be a problem the article completely misses.
Chip manufacturing is such a mature technology that just changing the interconnect from aluminum to copper took decades of work. Don't expect to see diamond substrate on real chips any time soon.
Japan is investing six million dollars in this research?? Come on! Intel is investing six billion in R&D just to figure out how to drive the next generations of silicon technology!
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Everybosy seems to be interested in the possible use as a semiconductor well whilst useful and possible in a few years what about something more straight forward slap a layer of diamond directly ontop of the silicon (well obviously not directly as this could have interesting conductive effects). Then you can immidiately start cooling your chip quicker sure diamond can take the heat but you must remember we don't want the heat hence all the coolers in the first place. With the increase in heat flux from the chip to the cooler you should be able to get a fair few %age points extra out of the chip. think about the difference between copper and aluminium coolers.
now think of a layer of diamond on top of the chip connected to the copper cooler. the increase in cooling capacity makes the chip run colder, well untill you crank the speed up.
So no reason to wait for the larger pnp wafers if they can mass produce thin 1" dia. wafers we can use them right now in the manufacturing process and for that nobody cares what colour it is just what it's thermal conductivity is.
Abrasives for industrial application were the FIRST place where synthetics were used. I believe the synthetics made the "old way" are called "popcorn diamonds" because of their unusual structure (Perfectly suitable for abrasives but not suitable for ANYTHING else.)
I don't think DeBeers has any presence whatsoever in the industrial abrasives market anymore, synthetics have been dominant in this field for a LONG time.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Imagine a PDA with a thin layer of diamond over the screen. You could use a stainless steel stylus and never scratch it!
Artificial diamond of up to 7mm in diameter has been available commercially for a few years now - but bigger crystal sizes extend the range of uses - like the semiconductors in the article.
Hardness != toughness
Hardness is a material's resistance to scratching. Diamonds are the hardest substance on earth in this regard.
Toughness is a material's resistance to breaking when stressed. Diamonds are NOT optimal in this regard. IIRC, diamonds (like most crystalline substances) shear quite easily along their crystal lattices. i.e. they are not in ANY way shatterproof. (This is how diamonds are usually cut - Sheared along their lattice planes.) A diamond will shatter easily if you hit it with a hammer.
It's the same reason one must be careful with silicon carbide tools (drill bits, etc.) - They're damned hard, but they tend to shatter easily.
Now a polycarbonate (nearly impossible to shatter - I can attest to this after having my eye saved by polycarb lenses from a hockey puck at a Cornell vs. Harvard game. Harvard players suck at hockey. The puck is supposed to go into the goal in front of you, not the upper row of the pepband to your left.) lens with a diamond coating might be interesting, although the problem is that the diamond coating might be entirely unsuitable as a coating due to its index of refraction - Many glasses are actually MORE scratch-prone than their primary material due to antireflective coatings. Diamond might have the exact opposite effect - Scratch resistance but WORSE reflection and glare.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
hehe, no wonder I didn't find it 6 pages of junk. Before they used to have problems with Nitrogen tinting artificial diamonds. I guess they are doing color stones now because there are way to many clear or almost clear diamonds available and they couldn't possibly compete with DeBeers, as far as volume and $ needed to mine/make them. Another article said that someone paid almost a million for a red/pink natural diamond. If they can sell red diamonds for $7k per carat, they will definitely have tons of buyers.
Personally, I would rather buy a grown/cultered diamond than a rock mined by children in Africa and cut by slave labor in India.
On sept note, maybe Rio/SonicBlue/whoever will bring back the Diamond Multimedia (tm) name back. They used to make sound and video cards back in the day.
Noone said diamond chips have to run that hot.
Great, now Brides everywhere will be clamoring for the hottest new hardware on their Wedding Day.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Semiconductor behaviour is very much temperature dependant.
Also, diamond is what is know as a "metastable" material. Carbon really wants to be graphite at atmospheric pressure, and given enough temperature and time it will be. At room temperature it will take enormous amounts of time to transform to graphite, but as the temperature increases the time taken to transform drops to hours, minutes or seconds. At very high pressures carbon wants to be diamond - which is why it is so difficult to make the stuff.
Material Scientists used to laugh at a very lame James Bond plot - smuggling diamonds inside corpses and getting the diamonds out of the cremated ashes. If anyone actually tried that they would just get very expensive bits of graphite.
how much would Kobe's $4million makeup gift to his wife cost in cultured diamonds? it's comforting to know that with the advent of this technology, the average workingman will be able to buy his spouse off much cheaper...;>
Ahem. Diamond is CARBON.
It WILL burn, combustion point (in 1 atm) is around 870-1070K, that is, 597-797C, way less than it takes to melt those copper wires.
Tin solder would be in trouble, though.
just organic molecules -- ie ones containing carbon. This is not talking about neural interfaces or anything like that.
I'd love to see a retailer go into business specializing in synthetic gems. It's just a matter of marketing to convince the consumers that synthetic gems are superior in terms of beauty, quality, and morality (and price). Certainly, there's more than enough ammunition manifested in corrupt practices of De Beers.
Remember, you don't buy expensive natural diamonds for your fiance because you love her - you buy them because a De Beers marketing campaign convinced your fiance that if you didn't give her a 2-months-salary-expensive natural diamond, you DON'T love her.
Besides, even if you buy into that, imagine the size of the synthetic rock you could buy with 2-months salary. (Another business opportunity - expensive but enormous synthetics). Or if you just have to have your diamonds be unique, then how about custom diamond manufacture with introduced flaws, unique structure, colors or patterns including novel ones not seen in nature, even optical art.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
While I'd love to see diamond start to make inroads into the semiconductor business, it won't happen overnight.
There are a couple of big obstacles.
The main one that I recall was the CVD grown diamond was still polycrystalline.
The other problem, IIRC, was that it was difficult to find a reasonable lattice-matched p-type dopant for diamond.
[Actually, if bulk diamond were cheaply available, it would be good for all kinds of things because of its great strength and high thermal conductivity (about 5-6 times better than OFHC copper).]
The speed of sound in diamond is pretty fantastic, too, something like 17 km/sec!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Chips are usually packaged... why would diamond chips be exposed to the air?
I thought quicksilver was going to be the next Big Thing.
I remember a guy who had graduated from high school the year before me, and had gone to MIT. He wanted to experiment with vacuum chambers containing carbon (gaseous, I suppose), and a seed diamond. The idea was that it would act like a "supersaturated solution", so that lowering the temperature would cause the carbon to crystallize on the seed diamond.
Maybe it would have just produced pencil leads, but it sure sounds a lot like the CVD today.
They wouldn't let him try it.
This is so "bought"!
Aluminium, and to a lesser extent steel, used to be rare and expensive because only tiny quantities occur naturally. Especially in the case of a pure mineral, I can't see the justification for requiring a perjorative adjective.
"Synthetic" is intended to be perjorative, or else DeBeers wouldn't be pushing for it. It will never happen, but it would be sweet justice if the FTC rules that natural diamonds must be called "contaminated crystal carbon".
...that diamond from my ex that I have sitting around collecting dust.
I wonder if the CVD diamonds would have the same mystic properties as real diamonds. I'm no more sure about what makes a diamond an infinite energy sink (magickal energy, not electrical) than I am sure what colour octarine is. As a druid and an amature geomancer, I'd love to get my hands on one of these babies to see if they hold the same astral properties.
Ye flipping gods... I could have a wand with a diamond point on the business end rather than a quartz point. I wonder if they can grow them to specific shapes, or if they have to be cut, a diamond crystal ball would be badass.
Of course this is all theoretical. If it is in fact the process of superheating and supercompressing coal and graphite in the very bowels of the Mother that gives them all their power... then I'd still have to shell for the real deal on occasion (of course, if I'm getting a cut diamond, I'm only getting one with a polar bear etched into it). Still... it's worth checking out.
The chains are broken
Loki is free
Ragnarok is at hand...
I wonder how many people are willing to kill in order to stop this from over running the diamond industry; I certainly wouldn't feel very safe being involved in research of this type. Also I was wondering; if its $5 a carat, which I understand is cheap compared to what we are used to seeing diamond cost, how does it compare to the price of silicon?
Heh, yes - Aluminum is so cheap now - that when electricity prices spike, aluminum smelters shut down, and use their furnaces to generate power to sell on the grid instead.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The temperatures involved are 500-900 degrees Celsius (depending on stage, type of feedstock, and desired end products), and in at least some cases (first stage), they are running moderate pressures (600 psi, a few tens of atmospheres. Nothing compared to the insane pressures needed for diamonds though.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Flawless, beautiful gems for cheap. *silence from the geeks*. You can get married now! *more silence*. It can be used for faster computers. *Loud cheers--inform slashdot as fast as possible*. Don't be as obsessed with computers as the mainstream is obsessed with inanity. Isn't there a middle ground somewhere?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
No Joke!
Diamonds Help Fund Terrorism
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Al-Qaeda Funded by 'Blood Diamonds'
Pure diamonds have a tensile stength (good measure of "fragility") in the range of gigapascals, while, for comparisons sake, titanium has a tensile strength of around 1-2 megapascals. We're talking three orders of magnitude stronger here.
Arthur C. Clarke had us using them for space elevators in the 3001. Before nanotubes came and spoiled it for him, but yeah, monstrously strong.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The post to which I was originally replying made no mention of manufactured diamonds.
Didn't any of you guys read Michael Crichton's book "Congo"? We already tried to get those precious diamonds, and the gorillas kicked our butts. It's too dangerous!
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
There was a fascinating article on the multitude of tactics that DeBeers uses to prop up and control the diamond market published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1982, which I believe was referenced here on /. about a year ago.
It was quite long, but it's definitely a very interesting read which will probably change your perceptions of the true value of giving diamonds as important gifts...
I mean if you want to grow a thick wafer by CVD, you need a thick seed. And if you want to get a thick diamond, the cheapest way would be the Russian ones. Right?
Of course once you've made a thick wafer, you can chop it up for making more wafers or whatever.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
DeBiers: "A diamond is forever!"
SynthDiamondCoalition: "She'll never know!"
Ka-Ching!
Perhaps when they start using diamonds in computing, they will fall prey to Moore's law. Will diamonds double in size every 18 months for half the price?
(... or something like that)
$^)
We know diamonds can be turned into computers, and people can be turned into diamonds. So when your old uncle Joe turns up his toes, you can finally put him to some real work in your new Athlon Joe XP.
The culture humans do this , called "glanding"
can we use these in the meantime?
Weird. I have no idea what this guy is really trying to say. Maybe someone hacked into the story and put that there?
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Why can't ceramic materials be used for heat sinks on motherboards?
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
This is the REAL deal with these diamonds in semiconductors. I just stumbled on it at another site. Wow. Of course, I should have come up with it from the beginning. This is huge.
Power amps. These babies are where this tech is needed most.
Who cares about CPUs anymore. I mean it's no mystery that x86 means 66Mhz clock and if all you're doing is multiplying the clock and then splitting it into different tasks with the OS, then why not just have a separate CPUs? You know what I'm saying? How exciting is that really? You need twice the computing power, get a KVM. I have four boards connected to this monitor and I have another similar setup in another room and it's incredibly cheap. Why would I spend twice the bucks for a single monster machine when I already have all the excess computing power I need at the flick of a dial and they're all hooked together on ethernet? It goes back to my original point --the packaging is the problem.
But when it comes to driving those 21" inch woofers, there's no such thing as too much power concentrated in one space and who cares about the heat when you're cranking the jams. And just think, with all that power we could see 30" woofers make it in the consumer market. You could use a few thousand watts just for that one speaker.
Diamond transistors will bring block rocking beats to the deaf!
I've got to do my Canadian duty here, and plug Canadian diamonds. Canada is pushing to be one of the largest diamond countries in the world, and it is approaching 10% market share - much if not all of it outside of de Beers' control. Sure it hasn't had much of an impact on pricing, AFAIK, but it wouldn't take much more to ruin de Beers' pricing power.
Hell yes.
Diamond semiconductors have already been produced by several countries -- South Africa, Israel, and the former Soviet Union, among others.
The good things about diamond semiconductor are its thermal conductivity and high bandgap. The high bandgap especially makes it good for satellite applications, where radiation hardness is needed.
However, higher-bandgap material has lower carrier mobility, which translates into slower transistors.
So, yeah, diamond may be more heat-tolerant than silicon. But it would have to be -- its gate voltages would be higher. In any case, don't expect to see any GHz-class chips made in pure diamond anytime soon.
The research teams have been able to fabricate semiconductor gates. In other words, they have probably been able to make a couple lone transistors (on/off electrical amplification switches) -- long way off from computer processing.
You can run Doom on this about as easily as you can run Quake with your bedroom lightswitch...