Slashdot Mirror
NTT Verifies Diamond Semiconductor Operation At 81 GHz
Anonymous Coward writes "This story over at eetimes.com reports of a semiconductor made of diamond that is able to run at 81 GHz." Mmmm, foreshadowing.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Should be able to run Doom III.... heh.
Do you need a website upgrade?
...should we start imagining Beowulf clusters of these?
So, will these new chips be free as in speech, or free as in De Beers?
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
Does anyone know how hot these things will get?
in other news, M$ released Windows 2005 beta to NTT. "With instant messaging, help characters, voice response mouse buttons, and background autopatching, the operating system still takes 10 seconds to load Word." says Jerry Chang of M$ product development. "We feel this is the sweet spot. Give us Moore's Law, and we'll give the same speed you got used to in 1993."
"CPUs are Forever" is not conducive to Moore's Law.
I can give my wife a new processor for her birthday! I can see it now:
"But it's an 18 carat Intel, darling!" - "WHACK"
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
Good luck getting more than two of those chips, let alone a cluster of them.
Vacuum tubes still being used in production broadcasting... I did not know that...
Screed
...not just a girl's best friend anymore.
So with all the problems we're having these days getting data (memory) near all of these cycles, I can't even imagine what the situation would be with a processor built around these kinds of speeds.
I'm imagining something like Dante's level 7 cache or something.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
"The diamond devices are expected to be in demand to replace with the vacuum tubes that are used in the high frequency, high-power applications such as receivers and transmitters at digital TV broadcasting stations."
Now why wouldn't they think people would use them in computers?
If these get this fast and this hot, I can see now the idea of any form of material around it spontainiously combusting if a coolant system dies. Just think, no dust problems, it just incinerates in the case.
30 W/mm??
Don't they mean 30 W/mm^2?
SCO (noun.)- A Slimy Corporate Ogre. Often seeks free money.
the next big ceiling in CPU design is electricity consumption. Nobody cares about it in PCs now, but when CPUs start hitting several hundreds watts, businesses and home users will be forced to take it into consideration or else be badly burned each time they open their power bill.
Making CPUs faster is all very nice, but the deciding point in purchasing an AMD vs Intel CPU in a couple of years may very well be in how much electricity it uses, even more so than how fast it is.
Vacuum tubes are still used as the final amplification stage for TV and radio broadcast transmitters. They're the best thing able to handle the power efficiently, even today. Try building a semiconductor transistor with a gate width measured in centimeters (compared with microns); it's tough.
This tech has some serious military applications.
Killing devices like the star drek phaser is not that far off. The high energy output potential because of the thermal characteristics is scarry! Just imagine if the output of a cell phone could have a signal db and directional capable antenna. Yipes you could get scrambled brains if the antenna was too close. The radar and remote sensor applications for this could kick current US stealth tech out the window as well.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Can I borrow your wedding ring for the lan party??
Money not found! A)bort, R)etry, D)eclare Bankruptcy
81GHz is the switching speed of the transistor, not the processing speed of a resulting PC. Some of the reasons are:
* CPU's perform a large number of transistor switches in a single clock cycle.
* The rise/fall response time must be much smaller than the switching time.
Don't be uninformed...oh wait this is slashdot. Vacuum tubes are still used in RF broadcasting, especially digital TV because the are able to reach the power levels necassary to broadcast a 50kW radio signal at low enough distortion to cleanly transmit the digital signals.
I noticed one thing... Anytime there's an article where nobody really understand the concept or the technology underneath it, for example like this one... And what did fellow slashdotters do? Crack jokes over it.. You guys are outrageous! ;-)
Will sys-admin for food
> Now AMD's PR ratings will be through the roof!
I for one welcome our new Athalon 81000 XP++ (56700mhz) space heaters!
The unofficial
...does that mean we'll have cubic zarconium CPUs for the cheapos? I can just see my dad buying me a glass CPU while Jimmy down the street gets a diamond one.
"But boy, you can't even tell the difference! Look at it gleam in the light!"
"Dad, that's the case lighting on fire."
This lengthy article gives a fascinating history into how the DeBeers cartel has created artificial scarcity in the diamond market and convinced the western world that a "Diamond is Forever". Before the 19th century, no one ever had to spend 6 weeks salary on an engagement ring!
There are some really great uses for vacuum tubes. Here's a couple:
1) High quality audio reproduction. Any home audio freak will tell you nothing sounds like a sweet tube amp. There is both anecdotal and scientific evidence for the superiority of tubes versus semiconductors. Why then do we use semconductors as audio amps? Price and size. For a home theater amp, semi's cost anywhere from $100 to $900+, and tubes cost anywhere from $500 to $20,000.
2) High frequency amplification. Good for rf transmitters. They have many other high frequency uses as well.
Don't discount the tube!
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
DeBeers is shitting a brick over it too, because that means its nearly impossible to tell a diamond from the ground from a lab one, except the lab one is even purer. The good part of this is the tech industry has far more muscle and clout than DeBeers does. DeBeers is truly an evil company sown on the blood of africa and putting them out of business would do the world a favor.
In fact, the only way for this technology to become realistic is for large scale lab diamond growing like I mentioned above. Its still many years off.
-
Okay, seriously moderators, it's time to stop moderating "diamonds are a geek's best friend" and "maybe now I can give my girlfriend a [heavy-duty graphics chip of the day] for our anniversary" as Funny. Every freakin slashdot article that mentions diamonds in any context has these jokes. That's what the "redundant" tag is for. :)
Anyone who's bothered to do the research into it knows that DeBeers is about as evil as a multinational can get. Somehow I doubt that they are going to play nice with another industry that wants to use thier bread and butter product for making something that doesn't cost $100,000 a gram.
As I see it, there are one of only two outcomes here:
#1) Someone finds a way to make cheap diamonds, and DeBeers goes after them (in more ways than just the legal route) to make sure that #2 happens.
which brings me to
#2) Nobody finds a way to make cheap diamonds, and DeBeers can triple their prices. Of course, the diamond supply is already kept artifically low to drive up prices, so meeting this new demand won't be a problem at all (it'll just cost you the price of a small car to buy a CPU.)
I don't like this one bit...nope...not one bit. As if Microsoft's monopoly wasn't bad enough.
Vacuum tubes are used for high power broadcast transmitters.
If you're going to make a big UHF/VHF/FM/SW/AM transmitter, you are going to use power tetrodes.
For instance, a pair of Eimac 4CW1400KG/X-2242 are rated at 4,600KW, continuous. The tube uses water vapor cooling and recovers some energy by using the superheated steam from the tube to drive a steam turbine generator set.
The diamond devices are intended for power output stages of broadcast transmitters. I somewhat doubt that they will replace ultra high output beam tetrodes for 50KW and larger transmitters.
This month's issue of Wired Magazine has artificial diamonds as its cover story. Just finished reading it a few hours ago. Very interesting as to where this is going to take the diamond jewelry business (DeBeer's is in trouble) as well as the semiconductor industry.
I was a little surprised nobody mentioned this story that was posted recently here.
If this man and his product really pan out, we could see some eally exciting advances in the semiconductor industry. But there could be a billion dollar enterprise that might think otherewise.
A quote from said artice:
But De Beers wasn't backing down. Throughout 2000, the cartel accelerated its Gem Defensive Programme, sending out its testing machines - dubbed DiamondSure and DiamondView - to the largest international gem labs. Traditionally, these labs analyzed and certified color, clarity, and size. Now they were being asked to distinguish between man-made and mined. The DiamondSure shines light through a stone and analyzes its refractory characteristics. If the gem comes up suspicious, it must be tested with the DiamondView, which uses ultraviolet light to reveal the crystal's internal structure. "Ideally the trade would like to have a simple instrument that could positively identify a diamond as natural or synthetic," De Beers scientists wrote in 1996, when the company unveiled plans to develop authentication devices. "Unfortunately, our research has led us to conclude that it is not feasible at this time to produce such an ideal instrument, inasmuch as synthetic diamonds are still diamonds physically and chemically."
Yes, right after they tell you how much better records sound than CDs, and that aliens are stealing their newspaper.
The fact is, people just like the sound of a tube more, because of it's distortion. It doesn't produce a better, cleaner, or clearer sound, it's just a sound some people like more. That sound, in fact, could be reproduced with a good DSP.
Please point me to any "scientific" evidence that tubes are superior.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Very few people are understanding what the article is saying
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) on a substrate lying in a lab with very controlled conditions -- long way off from computer processing.
You can run Doom on this about as easily as you can run Quake with your bedroom lightswitch...
I explained it exactly above. If you underclock, rate of switching goes down, but the response time is the same. This means that in every unit of time, there will be less of the tranistions that cause heat dissipation.
Response time provides a maximum limit to switching speed. A device that is capable of switching fast, but is operated at a lower speed (underclocking), will produce less heat.
There are some very undesireable things about semiconductors. They are low power devices. They don't work well at high frequencies. Couple these faults together and you let out the magic smoke on higher frequency applications (mostly Sat-Comms).
There are work arounds for the low power problem. In my job, (US Navy Electronics Technician) I've worked on an LF transmitter that could crank out over 150KW. It was all solid-state. The workaround to not cook silicon? It used about a freaking million amplifier circuit cards. I think it might have been more efficetive to just use 4 PA tubes but whatever.
Now the problem is high frequency and high power together. Consider the semiconductor. Two (slightly) different materials with a depletion region in the center. Well that's basically like a capacitor. Capacitors tend to pass higher frequency signals. If the signal is getting passed, it is not getting amplified. This problem is called inter-electrode capacitance. Tubes suffer from the same downfall. They dont just resemble capacitors, they are capacitors to a degree.
The tube world has to use some pretty crazy devices to amplify signals at high frequencies. These methods cannot transfer to the solid state world. For more information google for "klystron", and "travelling wave tube".
But because the issue of inter-electrode capacitance cannot be easily solved with workarounds. The only way to have a high frequency, high power amp, is with a tube. With higher quality semiconductors, this will no longer be true.
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
This is part of the reason why the fibre optic revolution has been more of a slow turn... fast pipes are great, but it helps if you know where to send them.
81GHz isn't going to solve the problem - but it will help.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Apollo Diamond is now making near perfect crystal diamonds by vapor deposition. Their product has fewer flaws than natural diamonds. Since the diamond jewelry industry has been making a big deal out of "flawless" diamonds for a century, they're stuck - the industrial process is better than the natural one. Semiconductor process technology has been making near perfect crystals of silicon, quartz, sapphire, ruby, etc. for years, after all. This is just the next step.
Sapphires used to be rare gems. Not anymore. Linde Chemical started making synthetic star sapphires in the 1970s. Then sapphires went into volume production. Then the patents ran out. This is where the sapphire industry is now:
A few years, and bulk diamonds will be on the Home Shopping Channel.
That inhuman pack of gunship flying, mercenary hiring, indigenous population exploiting *ssholes can suck it down and shut up.
Our obsession over "pretty sparklies" is disgusting, and what we are willing to ignore to ensure a steady flow is reprehensible. How many middle-class housewifes with a rock on a finger know the TRUE cost of that shiny bauble?
Lets wake up to ourselves and try to develop a modicum of common sense? Why are diamonds expensive? Because they are in demand. Why are they in demand - no it is not the industrial applications? Because they are expensive.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Enhancement mode MOS transistors have characteristics very close to those of ideal pentodes, and should therefore give even better results (no transformers.) But that doesn't suit the guys (always guys) with the "golden ears" and the bullshit filter bypass.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
As for tube amps in high-power situations, that's still the norm. The reason tubes fell to discrete transistors was mainly due to the fact that tubes have to be heated to work right. While several tube heaters in a small radio mean serious inefficiency, a 200W tube heater coil in a 200 KW radio transmitter means that all of 0.1% of your broadcast power is used for the tube heater - no big deal. Add to that the fact that large transistors are very expensive and the difficulty of moving heat away from the junctions in something that large, and tubes are still the natural choice for really high-power applications.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
IBM has been testing SiGe chips at up to at least 350-400GHz last time I checked and producing and selling chips at up to at least 110GHz. Intel's made claims of tested transistors in the THz range.
Not to rain on the "OMG look how many GHz or THz that is!" parade, but there are even higher numbers to "OMG" at =)
Put InP (indium phosphide) and SiGE (silicon germanium) in to google for more max Ghz fun...
There is probably even faster stuff than that out there!
I am sick and tired of people claiming tubes sound better,
Well, since "sounding better" is a subjective judgement, anyone who says so is right. They'd be wrong if they claimed that tube amps were more accurate than transistor amps.
What tubes have going for them is that they don't clip the way that transistors do when their power limit is exceeded. Transistors clip, tubes go non-linear and approach their power limit asymptotically.
Of course, anyone who routinely overdrives their amp like that has probably lost the ability to hear much more than the ringing in their ears.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Tube sound is different than solid state sound. I have a old Dynaco ST 70. Blow the shit out of anything solid state. If you do not believe me. Check out the newsgroup rec.audio.tubes. Also, tube amps just report the distortion figures correctly. Not like the Future Shop garbage of today.
I hope you're being sarcastic;
Actually, I'm being entirely serious.
the only area where there's even a difference between the output of tubes and transistors is when they're overdriven.
That's a damn lie. All the recording artists I know use a tube preamp on their vocals -- and how do you overdrive a vocal track other than screaming into the mic?
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
Yes, right after they tell you how much better records sound than CDs, and that aliens are stealing their newspaper.
Vinyl does sound better than a CD. You can't can't make sweeping generalizations without having first the oppurtunity to listen to both formats. Truncated 16 bit digital, even when played with the best of CD players and/or DAC's (Mark Levinson. Classe Audio, etc) is audibly inferior to the vinyl disc. I'm sorry, but even the hardiest proponents of CD upsampling will tell you that, once you throw those bit's away, there gone forever.
Don't get me wrong, I thought vinyl addicts were delusional once myself. I love the convenience of CD: portability, instand skip to track, really deep bass.
But after auditioning a decent analog setup (decent meaning $500 table/arm/cart combo and a $199 solid state phono preamp) it was almost a religious experience. Even my girlfriend, who isn't an audiophile by any defenition of the word, noticed how much more easy going the music was, compared to the same albums on CD.
The fact is, people just like the sound of a tube more, because of it's distortion.
You probably right, but then again you could say humans are analog in nature and distorted, and that's ok. Just realize that most young people today have never heard a decent analog setup with some tube amps. Woudn't it be interesting if (and, I admit, this is a big if) the reason people are buying less music, or spend less time listening to music for pure pleasure (as oppesed to having it as background music while using a PC) is because digitized truncated music doesn't connect with the human soul the way an analog signal does?
That sound, in fact, could be reproduced with a good DSP.
I'm sorry, but I highly doubt that. Analog and digital will always be just that.
I wish that anybody who has even the slightest interest in analog music reproduction to go find a good hi-fi audio dealer and ask them a an audtiom of even a modest tuntable/phono preamp combo.
Most dealers (the ones in NYC do anyways) have vinyl discs on hand. But your better off going in with an album that you really familiar with, and album you would take to a desert island if you could only bring one with. Go listen to it on vinyl and see what happens. You ain't go nothing to lose.
Personally, the amount of time invested in vinyl (keeping discs clean, storing them properly, having to lift teh stylus and placing on the disc -MANUAL LABOR!!SHOCK HORROR!) is well worth the benefits of listening to pure analog music.
Analog:2 a : of, relating to, or being a mechanism in which data is represented by continuously variable physical quantities b : of or relating to an analog computer c : being a timepiece having hour and minute hands.
Sorry for the slightly off topic rant.
If you want to get pedantic, pick any pair (x,y). unless equals(x,y) is true, different(x,y) is true. Now better(x,y) is a special case of different(x,y), but its meaning is context dependant.
Sometimes better(x,y) maps to greater(x,y) or less(x,y). So it is entirely possible that for some value of better(), better(tube, silicon) is true. If, for example, I'm a salesdude at a hifi store and you are a customer with stacks of cash. Then *clearly* better(silicon, tube) is true. However, after I sell you the tube amp and I'm spending my commission check on my own amp, better(tube, silicon) is true as long as I'm trying to optimize for a maximal personal bank account.
If I'm trying to create the best listening device for my music, then... it doesn't matter. All my music is in MP3 format which horribly degrades the original signal. A nicely distorting vintage tube amp and a nice martini are probably the ideal combination to help me forget.
"Actually, improvements like pipelining don't affect the maximum clock frequency of a microprocessor (the GHz thing) very much. What they do improve is the average ammount of processing work that can be done per-clock-cycle."
A 20-stage pipeline is one of the many reasons that the P4 runs SLOWER clock cycle-for-clock cycle than its predecessor or the Athlon.
A 3 GHz P3 will trounce a 3 GHz P4. But because of its design, the P3 can't scale very far beyond 1 GHz. The P4, on the other hand, still has lots of room to grow.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Actually, according to an article in a recent (this month?) Wired magazine, there is a corporation in Boston which is developing ultra-pure diamonds using a vapor disposition techinque. While the initial generations of diamonds produced in this way will be expensive, if they prove useful, mass production will ultimately drive the price of diamonds through the floor. Haha! take that DeBeers! (seriously, DeBeers's corporate executives cannot come to the US without being arrested, and they are single handly responsible for keeping the price of diamonds so high that wars can be financed via "blood diamonds" even though the mineral is not actually rare)
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
The article writes about problems with the diamonds purity. However, September's Wired has an article about manufactured diamonds for this purpose. One of the diamonds created by a plasma carbon process can be used to grow diamonds in a wafer shape for processing. They have succeeded in creating a positive charge with Boron and also a negetive charge also using Boron in a process. This allows npn or pnp transisters. Because they are grown instead of mined and DeBeers does not control them, they are also cheap enough to be a mainstream computing resource. These diamonds are flawless and perfect size and shape. Unlike trying to use mined diamonds, you dont have to find diamonds that match because they are all grown the same.
The reasons that we can't with current generation hardware are:
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
there is a corporation in Boston which is developing ultra-pure diamonds using a vapor disposition techinque
You're thinking of Apollo Diamond, which plans to use revenues from selling vapor deposition gemstones to fund research into diamond semiconductors. There's a nice writeup about synthetic diamonds at E2.
However, in many markets, synthetic diamonds sold as gemstones have to be labeled as synthetic, giving De Beers an out: "A diamond isn't forever if it was grown in a lab five days ago."
Will I retire or break 10K?
Is the diamond transistor really even all that special? IBM announced a 210 GHz transistor a long time ago. Any wonder why the PPC 970s are kicking the crap out of anything Intel has to offer? [Sorry, I couldn't resist ;)]
Many other properties are required to make transistors useful for implementing microprocessors, memory, or other complex peripherals used in computers. Complementary devices are needed (high speed in both N and P channel) to implement high density logic without excessive static power consumption. Withness the sucess of GaAs semiconductors for CPUs, using only N-channel devices! (but GaAs is well established for RF amplifiers of course).
High quality insulators are needed to fabricate many layers of metal interconnect (SiO2 happens to be glass... but obtaining good insulators on top of most materials is quite difficult). A way to produce a good ohmic contact in a tiny area between the semiconductor and metal is also needed (for a single transistor used in an amplifier, only 3 contacts are made and large area can be devoted to them). Vertical fabrication techniques used for high power single transistors obviously can't be used for complex circuits with many transistors, so all these requirements must be able to be met with many fabrication steps.... and the fact that they're growing the film at such a low temperature will make all the subsequent steps quite difficult. Even after acheiving all these difficult properties, a new material like diamond must support extreemly small geometries over very large areas to achieve the transistor counts required to be competitive with modern silicon CPUs.
Perhaps someday diamond semiconductors may be useful for complex circuitry.... but to think that now is quite silly. The targeted application is analog signal gain at these extreemly high frequencies, which will open up a massive portion of spectrum that's previously been unavailable. That is arguably even more important than continuing Moore's "law" for increase in CPU speed and memory size.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
It's not a senseless bash against Windows. It's a legitimate concern that makes it difficult to use Windows for professional applications like audio production. It makes absolutely no sense to optimize for the eyes when the ears are much more sensitive to dropouts. If there's a momentary delay opening a menu, people won't notice that as much as their audio buzzing while the menu is opening.
A solution to the problem with music today
Given that the final shuttle accident report was released today, I'm surprised that no-one else has touched on this topic.
The Reinforced-Carbon-Carbon panels have been noted to get very pitted and pot-marked over time. Indeed there has always been serious concerns over this component.
Given the chemical process for synthesizing diamond wafers, isn't it reasonable to deposit a single sheet part super heat conductive material that would replace the reinforced-carbon-carbon on the space shuttle wings. Diamond is the hardest substance known to man. Isn't it reasonable that such a macro-application would be reasonable and logical.
Other near term application could be heat sinks in other industrial super-heated applications. I could even imagine sythesizing the linings of cannon barrels out of sheet diamond. How about aircraft "black boxes" made out of sythesized diamond so that they absoluetly CANNOT be destroyed.
On more application could be to organically grow the hull of a small submarine capable of diving to tremendous depths. A sufficiently polished application could be optically transparent!!!! That is no portholes required. Remember "transparent aluminum" from star trek. A chemically deposited transparent diamond panel could probably kick it's ass in strenth.
How about armor for tanks, helicopters and planes???? A thin panel may be stronger then the most exotic alloy.
A sufficiently advaned systhesizing process may be capable of produce "machine grade" parts that will effectively NEVER wear.
The 20th century was the century of steel. With a reliable diamond production process, and technology that generates carbon nanon-tube threads (as well as bucky ball "bearings"), this could be the century of carbon!!!!!!
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Although diamond-based semiconductors will have their applications, they won't replace silicon in most mainstream computing applications for decades. Consider GaAs, a semiconductor that is faster and better than silicon. It was hailed as the natural successor to silicon back in the 80s. Yet, this delightful material has yet to replace silicon in a host of speed-sensitive applications because it is too hard to work with in large dies. The manufacturability of dense speed, not pure speed, is the real issue -- can you reliably pack 100 million multi-GHz transistors on to a diamond substrate for under a $1000?
A secondary issue is that diamond is actually inferior to silicon in power consumption because it has a much higher band gap voltage (5.4 V vs. 1.2 V). This means that circuits built from diamond must operate at higher voltages and thus consume more power. You think your laptop gets hot now, wait til the circuits are all based on diamond. Only if diamond can be fabricated into smaller circuits with lower junction and trace capacitance and lower resistance in the traces could a diamond-based circuit operate with less power dissipation than a similar silicon-based one. We should not confuse diamond's superiority for speed and power as being a superiority of power efficiency
The bottom line is that it will take many many years and many billions of dollars of investments for diamond-based semiconductors to be economically fabricated in with the densities and low rate of defects found in silicon-based semiconductors. And diamond's high power consumption may prevent its use in many applications. Until such hurdles are overcome, diamond semiconductors will be a crucial for niche applications but silicon will enjoy its continued reign as the main material used in digital electronics.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Chips in these frequency ranges are analog - low noise amplifiers, mixers, and power amplifiers. Commercially available chips are available up to 100 GHz or more. These chips typically have no more than 20 or 30 transistors, if not much less. The chips are ussually based around GaAs or InP processes.
The current limitation of these chips is power. The leader is TriQuint, which produces chips that produce 1 to 4 watts around 40 GHz. Thermal limitations are important - GaAs is a terrible thermal conductor. And these analog amplifiers are biased with transistors in conduction, so the efficiencies are on the order of 15% - they generate a lot of heat. (There are other limitations as well, of course, having to do with breakdown voltages,gate width, and switching speed.)
Up until now, the option for high power is a good old fashioned vacuum tube - the traveling wave tube. They have several problems - poor linearity, high noise, the need for kilovolt power supplies, and reliability. Also, they're not cheap to make.
All this to say, diamond is an exciting prospect for analog power amplifiers, and it wouldn't take very many transistors to really make something valuable.
I'm away from my reference books at the moment - does anyone have a comparison of the electron mobility in diamond versus GaAs?
(My associates would consider me remiss in my duties if I didn't mention their high power solid state amplifiers, at Sophia Wireless
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.