Nanotech Brings Cheap Flat TVs From Diamond Dust

neutron_p writes "Nanotech scientists are going to develop new TV display technology made from diamond dust. It opens up the possibility of cheaper and more power efficient flat panel displays, for use in wide screen digital TVs and many other applications. Toshiba recently announced plans to launch a television based on a new flat-panel display technology called SED (Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display) in 2005. Sony and others have been working for several years on another technology called FED (Field Emission Display) but that too has yet to reach commercialization."

Comments

Diamonds aren't rare

[Schezar]

Diamonds aren't rare. In fact, there are more jewel-grade diamonds of large size and high quality than there are people.

The diamond industry works entirely off of the perception in most people that diamonds are rare. They strictly limit the supply, and spend more money advertising than they do mining.

If you don't believe me, take a piece of diamond jewelry to several jewelers and have it appraised. They'll all quote a fairly large sum. Now try to sell it to them. They'll offer you maybe 5-10% of what they quoted.

If you shop around, you'll find that you can't actually sell a diamond for anywhere near what it's "worth."

That said, synthetic diamonds scare the living hell out of the diamond industry, since they're cheap to manufacture and indistinguishable physically from a "real" diamond (which itself isn't rare, but I digress).

These displays will drive more research and capital into the diamond manufacturing market, which will drive diamond prices down.

Re:Diamonds aren't rare

[pz]

I've been saying for about 10 years that the jewlery diamond industry is doomed. Here's the reasoning.

1. Silicon ingots used by chip foundries are the purest substance available to man in production quantities, at 7 nines (99.99999% pure).

2. The semiconductor industry doesn't think twice about investing billions -- BILLIONS -- of dollars in manufacturing and R&D.

3. Diamond is a very interesting base out of which to build semiconductors: it has (from memory) a large band-gap, excellent thermal characteristics, and some blindingly fast transistors have been made in the lab out of it.

Once the semiconductor folks decide that they want to do large-scale diamond manufacturing, there's a huge impetus to generate higher quality diamond than has ever been mined, in quantities that will make the collection of mined dimonds seem a drop in the bucket. The only hope DeBeers has at that point is to market based on the imperfections of natural stones, since perfection, their current stock-in-trade, will no longer be a selling point.

Re:Diamonds aren't rare

[aluminum boy]

Actually, it is the flaws (to a degree) that make a diamond valuable. For instance, colored diamonds (e.g. pink) contain a flaw that give them color. A trained jewler can quickly tell the diffrence between "perfect" industrial diamonds and "flawed" ones. Really, the most valuable natural diamonds are the most perfect imperfect ones.

New Definition of "Nanotech"

[Baldrson]

Since we have now redefined nanotech to include anything that deals in nanometer scale structures, rather than artificially constructed mechanisms with molecules as components, how far back in time can we claim "nanotech" to have been practiced? The first crystal growth? Perhaps to the first time a crystal was cleaved along certain atomic planes?

Perhaps we could do something similar with "space settlement" and just sort of forget that 1973 was the year that western civilization turned away from its destiny in space and began threatning the planet with globalist growth.

That should make everyone feel better too.