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

cheap?

[confusion]

Combining nanotech (expensive) with diamonds (expensive) yields cheap monitors?

It's been a long day, so I know I must be missing something

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Re:Cheap?

[Gadgetfreak]

Diamond dust is a very common by-product from industries that use larger diamonds Synthetic diamonds are also a lot cheaper than most people think. Diamond-embedded grinding and cutting tools have been cheaply mass-produced for quite some time now. Compared to current LCD/plasma display costs, I don't think it'd be crazy expensive.
I guess it depends how perfect you want it.

Re:cheap?

[chochos]

Probably synthetic diamonds, you know, the ones made in high-pressure ovens that cost about $50 and are the bigger than a fist, and are great for this kind of stuff. There was an article on Wired a while back, which I think was also mentioned in /. about this technology. But since nanotech is being mentioned this time, then probably now the diamond dust is being created by nanobots?

I think thomeone

[Almonday]

...neeth to theck their thepelling, thister.

Pefect anniversary gift

[Anonymous Coward]

This diamond television means I can now buy the expensive tv I've always wanted and call it an anniversary gift.

"But, honey, you said you wanted diamonds, right?"

TV's made of diamonds

[loteck]

Finally, men and women will be able to agree that buying a bigger one is a good idea.

What a perfect use of new technology.

[Canthros]

Bring stupidity into my living room with crystal clarity. I can't wait.

Grandpa

[ValuJet]

Make a tv out of Grandpa

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

[infinite9]

The diamond industry works entirely off of the perception in most people that diamonds are rare.

I heard a story about how Russia had been stockpiling large quantities of high grade (natural) diamonds from their own mines. They went to DeBeers and invited them to buy their stock to prevent Russia from dumping them on the diamond market. DeBeers happily bought their entire stock at a excellent (for russia) price. How's that for limiting supply? :-)

Re:Diamonds aren't rare

[drinkypoo]

There is a book on this subject called "the rise and fall of diamonds" and it tells the story of who is behind the social constrction of the diamond mythology, why they were interested which was not purely monetary, when they got started, what they did, and how they pulled it off. When I found it listed on Amazon, it was listed as "RISE FALL DIAMONDS". I got it for about $12 and so far it's been fascinating.

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.

Re:SED vs. FED?

[worst_name_ever]

Neal Stephenson's Age of Diamonds?

I always thought his earlier book The Snow That Crashed was better.

Re:Cheap Diamonds

[DJ Rubbie]

Drag a white dwarf into orbit and mine it.

If one such white dwarf is made to orbit Earth, it would be Earth orbiting around it instead of the other way around. Depending on the orbital distance, the orbital period can be extremely fast, could be much faster than twenty-four hours, Earth's rotational period will be locked into this orbital period, resulting that the length of a day will change (it will probably be short). The side that face this white-dwarf will be bathed in radiation. Not to mention the sun and this white-dwarf will also share a center of rotation somewhere in the middle of each other, will definitely throw Mecury and Venus into unpredictable orbits, Mars will also have its orbit messed up, the asteriod belt will destablize, Jupiter and the rest of the planets may also be slightly affected by this new gravitational source. Who knows what will happen to the moon.

On second thought, that might be *more* expensive.

Oh whew, economics surely put a stop to this crazy plan to destroy the solar system for some giant diamond. Also, such a diamond would surely be expensive, and such an influx of wealth can surely destroy the global economy anyway.

RTFA

[marcus]

If you had RTFA, you'd know that no one here knows more than you do know. ;-) The linked piece was nothing but fluff, no substance at all. Here's a summary:

"Nanotech is great. Diamonds are great. Venture capitalists are great. Flat screens are great. We are going to be rich!

1) Nanotech
2) Diamond dust
3) Flat screens
4) Profit!"

What's missing is something worth reading.

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.

Re:So informative

[gaber1187]

The main publications page for this group is listed here:
http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/pt/diamond/publicat.htm

Looks like they are using Diamond Like Carbon quite often... so its a quasi-zinc-blend structure apparently.

With field emission they are generating electrons so somehow the electrons get enough energy to reach the vacuum level. I wonder how efficient this is since diamond's bandgap is something like 5.5 eV.

-Gabe

Cheap, huh? Reminds me of an SNL quip...

[ecklesweb]

I believe it was Jimmie Falon - at a time when natural gas had spiked in price and alternative fuels were all the rage:

Hey! I've got an idea? How 'bout we make a car that runs on macadamia nuts and bald eagle heads!

Re:So informative

[gaber1187]

Ahh, I just figured out the answer. It says that diamonds have a Negative Electron Affinity. Which means that the vacuum level is more stable than the conduction band. Once the electron is excited to the higher state equalling the difference between the bandgap (5.5 eV) and the NEA value (which is 2.4 eV on hydrogen saturated surfaces) , the electron just flies out of the material instead of becoming delocalized into the crystal. So basically what they are doing is replacing the cathode ray tube as the source of the electrons. First flat speakers, now flat tv's!, cool!

Here's the original press release...

[argent]

Once again, the physorg honeypot grabs slashdot eyeballs. Physorg takes press releases and puts them up, with bad formatting, on ugly web pages... with no links to the original source.

So here's some missing links: the press release at Bristol, the diamond group at bristol and the home page of Advance Nanotech.

As you can see, that's a chemical vapor deposition group, so there's no need to grind up diamond dust from real diamonds. :) It's also, um, not exactly what I'd call "nanotech"... unless you consider any product involving structures at the molecular scale (like, oh, wood, or portland cement) to be "nanotech".