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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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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.
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
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]
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.
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.
-cp-
I remember seeing a program on the discovery channel or TLC about making fake diamonds, and they mentioned that executives from Debeers will never set foot on US soil, because if they did, they would be instantly arrested, for all the antitrust laws they have violated.
SuPz.orG
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.
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.
(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
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.
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!
"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?
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!
And be ready to suffer the consequences
I know you're joking, but I think that a lot of guys would really be surprised as to how reasonable a lot of women are these days about this issue.
Fortunately, there are options to buying a DeBeers diamond.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Ok, and god damn. A bit of research turns of very interesting things. It is amazing to me how things like this can sit out there a fester... all the info is out on the net. This Wired article should not be a surprise. Every night I sit at my computer with a fat pipe connection and try to think of good things to type into google. This one passed me and apparently most of us by;
From the Wired article, this is (as far as I can tell) Joshua Davis sitting in Antwerp, handing three diamonds made via chemical vapor deposition.
Another name. Only mentioned once in the aricle. One of many names. I wanted to know more. A series of google searches. the best one.
Success.
The first one that really catches my interest. a research paper. A quote:
For god sacks, that is a long quote, please go read the whole thing.
If I thought it couldn't get better, the www proved me wrong.
emphasis mine. He states Jim Butler as a reference. Uh. Not only do we have the future of microprocessor technology, we have a people researching as a method to connect it to living flesh.
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!
Imagine a processor that will run at many times the current CPU upper temps and not blink.
Yeah, but imagine the smell those burning dust bunnies will make.
Seriously though, if you are going to have something that hot, you'd need to completely change the entire mainboard design. The PCB would have to be made of more heat resistant materials (which would be trivial if the envirofreaks didn't effectively ban asbestos), and all the surrounding chips would have to be rated to deal with the oven-like heat of the CPU.
Not to mention, heat comes from power usage. We are already pushing 50-70 watts for current CPUs. Imagine having to buy a 2kw power supply for your computer. You'd need to plug it in to a special circuit like a stove or a dryer. Then imagine running the air conditioning in the summer overtime, to compensate for the 2kw heater that is running all the time (and waste money even in the winter, since heat pumps are far more efficient than resistive heat). The costs are not linear at all.
Anyway, my point is, there is an upper limit to heat dissipation possible in personal computers, even if the chip can stand it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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
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?
I think it will be great if the diamond market crashes because of this. The violence is in many parts of Africa, and the industry is corrupt from top to bottom. Horribly corrupt and brutal governments and mercenaries are being propped up and enriched by the trade. Look at Sierra Leone. Diamonds don't just stand for love; they also stand for murder and brutality. And diamonds aren't even naturally scarce; de Beers hordes them to keep the prices artificially inflated. They've maintained an empire with their virtual diamond monopoly for a century and they pretend not to be involved with the brutality. All the while convincing every hot chick in America that what they really need more than anything else in the world is a stone on their finger. I personally will feel a large amount of wry satisfaction if all those $20,000 bracelets and necklaces and rings are suddenly worth $5 a carat.
The industry is geared to Si because it is cheap, can be easily made into big oriented doped single crystal ingots, the ingots can be easily converted into single crystal wafers that can easily be made into chips.
I do not think the same is true for diamond. Where a silicon ingot can be pulled with a foot diameter and a couple feet in length, the diamond grows from a seed in a prism shape, and probably with a fixed orientation. This means the orientation must be set at the time of cutting, which impacts the actual size of wafer produced. To be compatible with current machines, the wafers will have to be rounded, which is an additional cost and incurs additional losses.
The size is also an issue. The currently exploited economies of scale dictate that the bigger the wafer the better. For instance, a wafer with a diameter of 1 foot can conceivably create twice as much product as an 8 inch wafer. This means that each step in a manufacturing process can often create twice as much product in the same time with the same number of machines. This is a really big deal. To put this in perspective, it could conceivable require over 200 machines using a 10mm wafer to match the production of a single machine using a 8 inch wafer. Of course this is massively oversimplified, but the point is valid.
Really the material costs are not all that significant. The manufacturing costs are what eat all the money. The are some application where the added manufacturing costs are not going to be an issue, but I do not see mass produced electronics. If they can get to 4 inches in 5 years, and 8 inches in 10 years, we should start seeing some diamond electronics. Of course, this is also going to be much harder than they are letting on.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
not realy, All you'd have to do is couple this with some new technology, like fiber optic busses and stuff like that.
Or you could just change the design of the motherboard to a 3 dimensional design, or do something simple like the older athlons or pentiums and put into a slot format instead of a socket one. That way you could put heat sheilds to protect componates.
then with heat differencials that high you could use natural heat convection to draw heat over the motherboard and and up past the cpu, that way again reducing the amount of heat reaching the componates on the motherboard.
After all we have nasa that can create communication satalites that can withstand thousands of degrees of heat on one side and temperatures below zero on the other side of the device and have these run for years with little problem.
I think creating motherboard that can handle a cpu that runs 800 degrees would be trivial compared to the act of actually creating that CPU!
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!
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.
Sure it would be nice if synthetic diamonds lead to world peace, but all I really care about is that this technology gets deployed before I need to get married. "Sorry honey, but I read on the Internet that diamonds are overpriced" probably isn't going to cut it.
-a
Whenever you like; there is nothing particularly difficult about (for instance):
CO2+4H2-> 2H2O + CH4
But now calculate how much methane you need to provide the hydrogen and the energy to drive the reaction..
Out of interest, the formation of oil happens at temperatures of 100-140 degrees celcius (pressure is virtually irrelevant), which trandlates to 2000-5000 meters underground depending on local thermal gradients. Gas is generated at higher temperatures.
If you wanted to make a liquid fuel, I would strongly reccomend a partial version of the above reaction:
3H2 + CO2 -> CH3OH (methanol) + H2O
You would need to build a nuclear power station or two (or a very large wind farm) to run the process, but this would give you a direct petrol replacement.
Another interesting point is if most of the value of the computer is now the diamonds that make it up, dumpster diving for old equipment could get even more profitable!
Well, dumpster diving for old computer is very profitable business. Nowadays, the amount of gold used in a computer is "very high". There's more gold in one ton of computer garbage than there is in one ton of gold ore in the best south african gold mines. And, given the fact that south african gold mines, are the mines with more gold per ton, you should get the point...
Diamonds are IMHO extremely fragile.
How fragile are they? I mean relative to, let's say, steal. will the force needed to bend a steal knife out of shape be enough to shatter a diamond knife blade?
Imagine a PDA with a thin layer of diamond over the screen. You could use a stainless steel stylus and never scratch it!
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!
A hexagon (honeycomb) would be the most efficient as far as preserving material. This may become more important as diamond wafers will intially be orders of magnitude more expesive than the equivalent silicon wafer.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!