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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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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-
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.
(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
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!
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!
The vapor process not only produces perfect diamonds, the process can be made to allow chemical flaws that one would find in real diamonds, essentially making them undetectable. I hope they don't try to sneak them into the market: I'd start buying diamonds for gems if I knew they were man made and not dug out of the ground by some one-armed three year old in Angola. Especially if they're cheaper than the 'clean' Canook and Aussie alternatives. I think a good marketing campaign espousing the treachery of the current diamond market while offering a perfect alternative would make these sell like hotcakes.
NMG
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
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
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.