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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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]
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.
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.
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
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.
Who would want some shine stones if everyone have them? It's the false sense of rarenes that makes them valuable. Hopefully diamonds will become a commodity like just any other rock.
It won't happen over night, but it will happen in a couple of years.
It's about time that someone challenges the De Beers and sell these stones below market value. There is absolutly no reason that diamonds should continue to have such a ridiculous price.
I'm looking forward to a colapse in the pricing of diamonds where one can get a *large* diamons for a couple of bucks.
So those of you that have diamonds other than for some sentimental reason: Sell why you still can.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
-cp-
Finally, I can ask my girl friend for a diamond laced motherboard with matching cpu as an anniversary gift. Why a diamond is now truly for everyone.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
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!
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!
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
Screw that... screw having a motherboard laced with diamond... try a CPU that can handle multiples of the current 200 degree limit:
Five BUCKS per carat... let me repeat that. 5 dollars per carot. Damn.
You know all the effoft overclockers put into reducing heat? The complex cooling systems? The fans? The liqid nitrogen? Imagine a processor that will run at many times the current CPU upper temps and not blink. I don't give a damn if I ever where a diamond on my hand.
This is the break through that will allow Moore's law to continue to grow. Couple this with the recent things we've heard about the equivalent of Ohm's in the conservation of quantum sping, and we have the future of computing.
We may even blow Moore's law out of the water.
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
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.
You must have missed the part where there are entire buildings built out of diamonds.
"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!
I specifically told my husband, when I was still his fiancee, that I absolutely, positively, did NOT want a diamond as an engagement ring. I definitely knew all the facts about 'bloody diamonds' and I didn't want any part of them.
With the advent of manufactured (umm, "cultured") diamonds and their potential uses in computers, I suppose I might be interested in a little "bling bling" now. That is, if the "bling bling" is safely inside the newest, kewlest mega-badass computer. 8-)
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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
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
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.
Go get a periodic table and a description of how Semiconductors work.
Silicon isn't really a proper metal. Like carbon, silicon is on the borderline between metals and non-metals. Silicon forms crystals, just like carbon. It's because they form crystals that they function as semi-conductors - Silicon conducts quite poorly on it's own. Only when doped does it become a conductor. When doped with the appropriate substances semi-conductors have either extra valence electrons in the crystalline structure or "holes" where there should be, which serve to carry the current. Doping diamond should work the same way - Same column of the table, same number of valence electrons, similar crystalline structures.
Why?
"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)
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.
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 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?)
Hmm... so we'd get asbestos dust bunnies? With some of those boards on the market, natural selection would solve our problem of stupid computer users.
Not a problem - you've got the right idea about using a stove circuit. Just replace your stove with a computer, and schedule any processor-intensive jobs to run while you're making dinner.
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
Amazing how many brilliant solid state physics people are out there!! Technically silicon is a semi-metal; carbon is a non-metal. Check http://www.webelements.com/ for that info. They are in the same column but they behave very differently. They do not crystalize the same way. Ever hear of carbon rings? They are what organic chemistry is about. Carbon only forms diamonds under great pressure. Silicon forms nice regular crystals fairly easily. Also, since the bonds in carbon are so strong, doping goes a magnitude up in difficulty. Try reading about electronegativity and ionic transference for that. Doping diamond would work the same way, if you can get it to work at all.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
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 . . . !!!
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.
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.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Me too. After a while though I forget what I'm reading about.
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?
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
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...
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.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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
- they just decay on a timescale significantly longer than your marriage.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
It's actually quite a good question.
I can tell you specifically why diamond is not organic with a quick definition that organic chemistry is the study of compounds containing carbon. Diamond is a giant molecule of elemental carbon, so it is firmly inorganic.
Although that definition isn't perfect, some compounds such as carbon dioxide are also considered inorganic.
Some people say that organic chemistry requires a molecule to possess carbon-hydrogen bonds - but that is wrong as well. Tetrachloromethane (CCl4) - dry cleaning fluid - is firmly organic but with no hygrogen atoms to be found in the molecule.
Which leads me to conclude that organic chemistry is the study of carbon compounds - except carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and carbides.
Doubtless there are further exceptions.
Best wishes,
Mike.
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
Imagine a PDA with a thin layer of diamond over the screen. You could use a stainless steel stylus and never scratch it!
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?
This sig is intentionally left blank
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".
Seriously though, if you are going to have something that hot, you'd need to completely change the entire mainboard design.
I am not so sure this is a given. Heat production may stay in the 100W area. Temperature will go up though due to reducing the volume that heat is produced in, and the surface area the heat can be radiated from. So, the issue isn't so much making the motherboard fire proof or heat proof. The trick is making sure the heat produced by the CPU gets transferred to a larger volume that can radiate it away and maintain a lower temperature before it reaches something that might go up in smoke. This may even mean that you actually want an insulator between the motherboard and the CPU package. You will also want someway to prevent the pins from conducting heat to the motherboard.
Consider an Athlon that was half the surface area to radiate from but still produced 70W. You then put the same heat sink and fan as a current Athlon. What will happen is the chip will increase in temperature until the temperature difference between the heatsink and chip is sufficient to cause 70W to move to the heatsink. If the CPU will operate at that temperature, then there should not be a problem. And, the heatsink temperature should remain identical to a current Athlon. (excluding non-heatsink related heat dissipation)
Dastardly
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.
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.
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!!!