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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.
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Should be able to run Doom III.... heh.
Do you need a website upgrade?
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.
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 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.
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.
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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.
Er, yeah, if you want a massive cellphone booster or something. This is definitely not a general purpose processor (CPU), 0.2um gates in 3mm^2 is insufficient density and area to make any kind of decent CPU (maybe an 8-bit PIC, which even a cluster of is weak by today's standards).
everything in moderation
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...
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.
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.
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