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Technology

Dawn Of The Diamond Age? 101

Posted by timothy from the two-months-salary dept.
Wiesel Werkstätte pointed out this article in Nature about recent advances in the use of thin diamond films as semiconductors, a tantalizing possibility which has been thwarted thus far by the overlapping, misaligned structures left by the process of deposting diamond in a film. From the article: "Matthias Schreck and his colleagues from the University of Augsburg have found a way to eliminate the grain boundaries. They have not removed misalignments entirely, but they have restricted them to narrow bands that no longer isolate one crystalline region from its neighbours."
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Dawn Of The Diamond Age? More

Dawn Of The Diamond Age?

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  • Of course, anyone who works or lives in a very tall building knows the limitation is the number of elevators needed, not necessarily the height. It's bad enough waiting for an elevator in a 50 story building.
  • The consumer diamond market has artificially high prices, and is controlled almost entirely by a single family in South Africa. They restrict or release supply as they see fit. It's like the oil cartel done right (from their point of view, I mean.)

  • The resistance of metals rises with temperature. The resistance of insulators drops. There is a potential problem there, but maybe you'd have to worry about keeping the wires or SiO2 insulation from melting first.

    Incidentally, semiconductor resistance usually drops with temperature -- so you on-state works better, but your off-state leaks more. Apparently diamond, if it can be formed into transistors, would stretch the point where it becomes too leaky to work out considerably.

    What I would be concerned about is this: what is the forward drop across a diode junction? This determines the minimum voltage where any semiconductor will work. For Germanium it was a fraction of a volt, but Ge was too leaky at room temperature. For Silicon, it's 0.7V, and leakage is reasonable up to about 150C. Diamond is next on the periodic table, with much higher temperature, so I expect the diode drop will be several volts. If there isn't some work-around for that, you can forget about gigahertz diamond circuits. They might be great for the high-voltage, high-powered stuff like controlling CRT's or the AC end of a power supply.
  • Processors currently cost a fortune made out of sand. How much will they cost made from diamond?
    The only reason gem-quality diamonds cost so much is that the De Beers diamond cartel has created artificial scarcity in that market in order to drive prices up to their current levels. (Diamonds used to be nowhere near as expensive in relation to other gemstones, and weren't even considered particularly desirable until sometime in the early-to-mid-20th century.) Industrial-grade diamond materials, such as are used in cutting tools and abrasives, aren't at all expensive. Also, the processes for making synthetic diamond are only capable at this time of making the industrial-grade materials; nobody is anywhere near capable of squeezing a lump of carbon into the next Star of Africa or Hope Diamond, let alone the smaller rocks to which women become so attached.
  • There's an intermediate step you have failed to anticipate. Diamonds are simple crystal--carbon laid out in definite, easily-described pattern. Genetics is knowledge (and eventually) skill at assembling more-complex crystals at an octave higher level of organization. Don't expect this civilization's advances to plot out in obvious linear sequence... it's all happening at once. Except for that mad scientist in New Hampshire messing with the nominal transportation schemes this culture is prepared for. There's no excuse ofr slppoiness.
  • "you want me to take my ring off before we go in that bar? aren't you afraid someone might try to seduce me if they think I'm your ex?"

    "trust me... nothing like they will if they see you're my X. I'd rather they just think we're a disconnected twisted pair."

  • Heh, I hope that was a troll.

    If not, YAAIdiot, and should sign up for the Malthion X project [badassmofo.com]

    echo $email | sed s/[A-Z]//g | rot13
  • There was a bit of a stink several years ago about manufactured diamonds. General Electric while researching how to make industrial grade gems in a less costly manner developed a method for making "perfect" gem quality diamonds. GE said "Whoo hoo! We are going to be more rich!" DeBeers(the South African company which controlled the diamond market for much of the century and still has an immense amount of control)got wind of this and whispered "Pssst Hey...GE... if you promise not to market this technology and stop development we will slip you some cash" Since GE did not want to get in to the jewelry business and DeBeers was offering a sizable sum they agreed. But, there was a problem. Someone blew the whistle and the US government decided that the agreement between GE and DeBeers was illegal. However, realizing that if this diamond manufacturing process became widely distributed it would send the precious gem market into a tailspin they gave GE and DeBeers a slap on the wrist for "Price Fixing" in the diamond trade. No mention of the new manufacturing process. Now it is common knowledge that "perfect" diamonds can be manufactured but everyone agrees not to make them because it would just end up hurting everyone's bottom line. The entire market value for diamonds is fabricated. Kind of interesting.
  • Never mind this namby-pamby insistence on structural purity! The only thing that counts is putting carbon where it's wanted, when it's wanted. When ya' can spray the forward bow o' me ship with a good friction-resistent coating, without yet another buer-ass tug trip to the next vacuum dock, then maybe I's ready to fork up some credits for a convenience like that. Bustlin' down through an atmosphere eats up profits; diamond don't burn like water during a trip, but it sure takes its costs at each end! (And I told you people leave me alone about Sihgs!)
  • So I saw something coller on disply, using diamond waffers with carbon schoring (done by lazers) one can create a heat sick w/ the carbon schoring as heat pipes. these wafers were then used as the "bread" in a process stack sandwidch. It was a stack of crays on top of one another with the diamond waffer heat sinks inbetween them, thus alloing a really short bus width between the processors. Then the stack was sprayed down w/ a colent, getting a supper computer in container the size of a box of tissues.
  • Ahh, I always thought they could manufacture diamonds to any grade and quality, but they were just prevented from selling them as jewellery. By the way did anyone read 2001 (or maybe 2010), there is a part in there where A.C.C. mentions that the pressure and temperature at the core of jupiter is sufficient that its core could be a diamond the size of the earth. I always thought that was a pretty amazing possibility.
  • First of all, Indymedia [indymedia.org] is, perhaps even more terrifyingly to your p.o.v., a website that is produced by hundreds of people and read by thousands more. It's all Open Source, too. Indymedia started at the WTO protest in seattle and it got more hits that week than CNN did, thank you very much.

    Secondly, De Beers certainly can see if it is using conflict diamonds. It is a diamond consortium (read trust) and has a lot of control over sources. That is why everyone is so nice to them when they graciously offer to do some sort of analysis that will enable them to see where their cut gemstones come from. Nice try guys but you really can't. You have to have personal knowledge of where they came from in your organization.

    Thirdly, I voted for Nader thank you very much. Gore sucks as much as Bush does in my opinion. Go read my K5 diary, it has lots of stuff about the story I have been working on for the past month for national publication, it is about a coal mine that spilt 250 million gallons of coal sludge in 2 river systems, this company is owned by a company that is owned by Fluor Corp which gave half a Million to al gore the so called Environmentalist.

    Fourthly, I think that people SHOULD be evenhanded. I would never write anything nearly as biased as what you will find on indymedia for the print publications off of which I make my living. I will however read indymedia as an antidote for the equally strong biases of the corporate media, which it openly tries to combat.

    Thank you for your response, seriously.
  • All the talk I've heard about diamond IC's is for very specialized applications like radiation-hardened chips (EMP's from a tactical nuke won't fry the diamonds themselves, though the rest of the circuit may be in more trouble) or very high-temp applications where for some reason you can't put the logic somewhere else.

    But I thought the major problem with diamond chips wasn't fault lines so much as the fact that you can't p-type dope diamonds; for reasons still unknown they simply boot out any such dopants. Which would make it kinda tricky to do anything useful as far as diodes or transistors. Are these people claiming any sort of innovation in that direction? Or is this result more useful for using diamond as a structural material?
  • The guy's premise was placing carbon atoms
    wherever he wanted it. You could use diamond
    crystals for compressive loads and use carbon
    nanotube fibers for tensile loads. Given a
    composite material of both structures of carbon
    I think you could make a very strong *and*
    flexible *and* non-brittle building material.

    As to whether this material would burn or not...
    I don't know.
  • Sure:

    Upcoming ages as they will be called by the media:

    The Linux Age.
    The Information Age II.
    The IT age.
    The VR age.
    The Robotic age.
    The Genetic age.
    The Microsoft Age.
    The Age of Media.

    And now for 2002....

    --
  • The consumer diamond market has artificially high prices, and is controlled almost entirely by a single family in South Africa.

    DeBeers, England, with large mines in South Africa.
  • ah, slip dislocations, interstitials, and what-not.
  • Iron melts at 1535 Celsius. Quite a bit more than that...

    Kiwaiti

  • Uses (Score:5)

    by maraist ( 68387 ) <michael.maraistN ... m ['AMg' in gap]> on Wednesday January 10, 2001 @12:55PM (#515916) Homepage
    It doesn't look too incredibly exciting. First of all, the process by which the diamond is made is substantially different and more flawed than silicon wafers (annealing liquid silicon verses condensation of gasious carbon). They say they've merely discovered a method that reduces condensation disturbances to a usable state.. But when we're designing gate-widths that are only a couple dozen atoms wide, these disturbances will probably be monumental.

    The main advantage of these are high temperature (500C instead of 150C with Silicon). One theoretical advantage is running higher voltages at hotter temperatures with less breakdown. So you could over-clock these babby's. :) Another theoretical advantage is the diamond structure should be denser than silicon, which could mean smaller absolute minimum gate lenghts.

    One issue will have to be the metalergic process by which copper attaches to the carbon. It took hundreds of small miracles to find the right intermediate layers to get copper to stick to silicon; will it take just as long for carbon?

    Don't know if better or worse, just know that it'll be different. And from the looks of it, more expensive
  • Except of course diamond is far too brittle, we know of no way to weld or bond it and then there's that fire issue...
  • > So will DeBeer's take charge of all the processors? I can only imagine what prices will be like then.

    DeBeer's main fear at the moment is not diamond films in processors, but those artifical diamonds made in Russia with huge presses.

    They spend a fortune just to make test equipment available that can decide wether a diamond is articifical or not.

  • Carbon is abundant -- it's all around us. Although removing carbon from the living carbon reservoir might be undesirable, in the short term the supply is more than sufficient for a technique like the one in the mentioned article.

    With a practical method of large scale diamond coating we could preserve structures, heirlooms, and treasures almost indefinitely. We could create surfaces that are virtually scratch proof, and optics that only deform under the most extreme conditions. With the technology to create panels of diamond we could create incredibly thin windows that are structurally superior to steel. With sheets of colored or opaque diamond we could build structures that would last for eons.

    And don't forget one current application for vapor-deposition diamond: coating the cone with diamond creates bitchin' hi-fi tweeters. :)

  • Does this mean I can get a primer for my daughter? (would you order that from fatbrain?) But just keep in mind now for all the rest of the problems just let Judge Fang spend a few hours with them that should take care of all their problems. This is OT but then again so is this entire comment how good is Zodiac?
  • Normally I wouldn't respond to something like this. I'm compromising that after looking at your web page.

    I only hope you do not have children, and if you do you do not pollute their head with this extremist activism against anything. First off, your post is completely OT and very inflammatory of DeBeers. You really are in no position to tell others that they are an evil company because you feel they have allowed themselves to be tricked.

    My guess is you have never worked into any B->B->C type chain, because most of the time you have a good idea where something came from you really don't know. DeBeer's cannot devote the resources to ensuring that each and every diamond came from a nice peaceful mine with dwarves singing "Hi Ho" as they chip away at the rock.

    After reading both your main site, and your protest site I really have to say - Stop reading national enquirer. Good grief, you are so against all the bad things Bush stands for you wont even give him any credit on valid things he does. C'mon - like Gore is any better of a man than Bush is. They are the same, a simple man with a cabinet behind them and a country to support them. This country will not let them ammend things to the constitution and take away their guns, and cause oil companies to start spreading baby seals on their ships. Get a grip on reality, look at history and realize that there are more sides than what you see because from everything said (on your site) it seems you really only look on sided.

    Now that I'm done with that, and you wont listen because you will blow me off as a conspirator or naive consumer I'm going to get back to my code.

  • Diamond chips aren't really for the mass market, obviously. But certainly all of us could come up with a few different industrial uses with out really trying that hard. Smarter nuclear reactors, smarter furnaces, smarter engines of all forms etc. The above uses don't even scratch the surface when one considers marrying them with micromechanical devices. Why approximate data with some statistical model when you can just gather it directly and in real time? But aside from the fact that there are many uses waiting for the diamond chips, I might make the observation that there was a time when these huge rooms with vacuume tubes were only useful for cracking codes and calculating artillary tables.

    Also it's worth noting that diamond stops being a semiconductor at 500C. I hate to dust off ye ol wayback machine (I never know if it will work properly) but I seem to recollect that Diamond became usefull around 220C. Obviously the performance of a 300C chip would suffer somewhat due to more electrons being scattered by the high temperatures, but it's not so much their preformance, but their useability that is the issue. Besides wouldn't we all want to see ads for Cray HVAC/supercomputers?

    Warning! Suspect Anecdote Follows, Use Caution.

    Once upon a time I was making amorphous substoichiometric thin films of tungstun trioxide (WO3). The Air Force was interested in this (though not me specifically) because W03 could be made into WS2 which was a nice semiconductor, well at least the band gap was attractive. It was a little higher temperature than Si. What the hell would they want with that? Well they wanted to use it to replace the mechanical devices that read the fuel pressure in the tanks of their fighter (probably all planes). I know for commercial planes 1 lb of weight translates to an additional $20k of annual operating cost (for a fighter plane I'd assume it's many times greater). But not only would such devices be much lighter, they'd be much smaller, and more reliable. It's the boon of solid state physics, as one makes things smaller, nearly every property improves. There were some other characteristics of WS2's structure that made it handy from a manufacturing stand point, but it was the band gap (higher temperature operation) that made it useful. I certainly see how the air force might want high performance fighters that had more room for accessories, while being more reliable and cheaper to fly. Something to consider.

  • Your grasp of semiconductor physics is appalling. Please shut the fuck up.

    -Ryan
  • And waz zis supper computer only waffer thin?

  • Cu CPU (Score:3)

    by Kibo ( 256105 ) <naw#gmail,com> on Wednesday January 10, 2001 @03:12PM (#515925) Homepage
    Oddly enough the difficulty of using Cu (Copper) on Si (silicon) is somewhat of a special case. Si crystal has the unfortunate (or fortunate depending on your point of view) property of being shaped like Cu sized tunnels. This had been known for ages. Back in the old days researchers would put a Si crystal an a big slab of warm Cu to let the Cu migrate into and throughout the Si. The Cu would zoom through the crystal and home in on the defects, this of course made the defects in Si crystals much easier to study. But having this same thing take place when you're trying to lay down a nice pattern on your precisely doped Si is somewhat less that ideal. Now I'm not a wiz a crystalography, but I can't "see" any orientations of diamond that would be like cu sized tunnels.
  • whip out that spell checker buddyboy.

    let's see... 'cooler', 'wafers', 'scoring', 'lasers', 'sink', 'sandwich', 'allowing', 'coolent', 'super'

    that should take care of that.

    the carbon you speak of is most likely Buckminster-Fullerine, a.k.a. Bucky Balls. you wanna make some quick bucky balls? take your average cigarette lighter (not the one from your car, should you have one), light it, and hold it under a spoon (metal, not plastic. plastic works, but it tends to melt much more readily than metal). the 'soot' that accumulates on the back of the spoon is the buckyball form of carbon.

    the other possibility are nano-tubes. wonderful little things, those, but they're far too fragile to serve as a load bearing structure such as you speak.

    another nit-pick. crays are super computers, granted. however, the term 'cray' does not apply to the cpu's used in such computers. cray built super computers by combining multiple cpus in parallel, like a dual cpu system, only with a lot more. cray is not the only company to do this. sgi is also quite fond of parallel processor power.

    my suggestion, next time you wanna try and post something intelligent, a) don't just blurt out the first thing that comes to mind, b) do a lil reading before-hand, and c) spell check.

  • GaAs (Gallium Arsenide) is alive and well in the semi-con industry. head over to Lucent's Reading or Breinigsville (sp) facilities. Indium Phosphide's even got it's niche. these substrates are used most often in the opto-electronics arena, because of their carrier properties. The reason they never took Silicon on is because of their material properties. they're far too brittle for the traditional semi-con industry. compared to GaAs, you can use Si as a hockey puck. i've held GaAs wafers (2") in my hand and watched them crumble to dust. cause of death? thermal expansion due to the heat of my hand. i can see diamond in use in place of poly-si, but you're right about the cost.
  • Maybe I'm one of the few that saw this recently. There was a special on diamond's future on TLC iirc. DeBeer's found a slight difference between the synthetic diamond and natural diamond. Synthetic diamond would fluoresce, quite beautifly actually. They're naturally worried that soon synthetic diamond will be available and indistiguishable. Their solution: etch a microscopic DeBeer's logo into the diamond and pray to the Gods of Brand Loyalty.
  • so you noticed, huh? well where do we get silicon? have you been to a beach lately? i hardly think we're going to run out of sand any time soon.

    and yes, they really do make silicon from sand.

  • bunch of things here, as well as in the replies. first, copper doesn't actually touch the silicon. copper in direct contact with silicon causes *very bad things*. namely, "copper poisoning". as mentioned, the copper will "tunnel" through the silicon. what good is your copper interconnect if it shorts out the layers? tantalum is used as both an adhesion and a barrier layer to prevent this 'tunneling'. the same thing is done with aluminum.

    next issue, crystalographic orientation. silicon sets up crystals the same way carbon does.

    another issue, those 'disturbances', or grain boundaries are what gives poly-crystalline silicon the carrier (electron transport) characteristics we like so much for transistor gates. i'm not going to go into too much detail, because that would require digging thru every thing i learned over the past year finishing up an EE degree with a specialization in NMT (nanofabrication manufacturing technology), but grain boundaries for gates are good.

  • you mean like the coppermine core with aluminum interconnects?
  • Wait a moment, the advantage of the dimond film over silicon is its heat and voltage resistance.
    This would be great not only as fine jewelry but as a great weapon.
    Rapist: I've got a knife - pull your pants down.
    Woman: Please, hold my hand while I am doing that, I don't want to fall down.
    Next moment a casual spectator would be very surprised to see a burning man jerking hopelessly from high voltage discharge...
  • I've seen people researching this for at least
    20 years. Radiation hardened military chips
    was supposed an application.
  • In the Periodical Table of the Elements,
    carbon is in the same column as Silicon, one above.
    Therefore it has properties useful for circuit
    design, such as substrates and nano-wires.

    (Conversely biochemists have speculated on Si-based life.)

  • Instead of a ring for my girlfriend.... (Score:5)

    by AntiPasto ( 168263 ) on Wednesday January 10, 2001 @12:40PM (#515935) Journal
    Does this mean I can use my 3 months salary towards a computer? ;)

    ----

  • ...to implode Jupiter into a sun. During the process, millions of metric tons of C60 will be thrown throughout our galaxy, which we can then collect to use for building processors.

    Then those silly diamonds won't cost so much! Muwahahahah...

  • Reuasble (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So, then when these chips get outdated, I could take mine and get it mounted on a ring at the jewler's? So now when I get jewelery for the girlfriend, I need to worry about clock speed also?

  • How much will they cost? (Score:3)

    by Decado ( 207907 ) on Wednesday January 10, 2001 @12:41PM (#515938)
    Processors currently cost a fortune made out of sand. How much will they cost made from diamond? Also will the current duron/celeron chips be made from cubic zirconium the low cost alternative?

  • Covering monuments with diamond film... (Score:5)

    by stroppy ( 52303 ) on Wednesday January 10, 2001 @12:44PM (#515939)
    In one of Arthur C. Clarkes '2001' series (the end of 2010, I think), the decay of historical monuments has been halted by covering them in a film of diamond atoms.

    This idea has stayed with me for years.

    *Sigh* imagine Paris, in the springtime, the Tower and Arch sparkling like diamond in the morning sun...
  • Manufactured diamonds are relatively cheap. I read of one experiment in which film diamond (the old kind) could be condensd out of natural gasses extracted from sewage. Cast not pearls before swine...
  • This is the last thing we need the chip makers to get a hold of. I can see it now...

    Intel 6 Processor
    Now with Diamond Technology
    Retail: $1,500.00

    Nothing like a little skewed facts to give businesses a reason to charge more for their products.

  • If we were alwasy turned away by little challenges, technology wouldn't go anywhere. When you see some sort of problem or barrier -- in this case, the problems with electric circuits at high temperatures -- it doesn't do any good to say, "That'll never be solved ... just forget it." When we do solve it, then our technology will be that much more useful.

    (Of course, my knowledge of this stuff runs about as far as yours, so it's possible that this isn't a problem/is unsolvable/is useless. But leave that judgement to the experts.)

  • The bad guy in Strange Brew?!?

    "Eh, there's a mouse in my mobo..."

  • Nope....Brewmeister Smith. One of my favorite movies, eh?
  • I'll be surprised if they can come out with a practical application for this.

    They're scientists... I'll be surprised if they CAN'T come up with a practical application for this. Heck... post-it notes were just a cool failure sitting around the lab. Someone will figure out how to build/market something using this tech. I guarentee THAT. How fast... thats another story. ::smile::
  • hmmmm - anniversaries won't be them same ever again.

  • Since diamonds are forever.. (Score:4)

    by ejbst25 ( 130707 ) on Wednesday January 10, 2001 @01:17PM (#515947) Homepage
    Does that mean I could like have an uptime of like 500 years? ;-)
  • (otherwise known as Fsck DeBeers. [debeers.com]

    They have said that they do not use conflict diamonds, [oneworld.org] which are diamonds that have been bought from human rights abusing governments and insurgencies in Africa. I.e. in order to get the mine where your diamond was mined, child soldiers may have been used, civilians killed and tortured, etc.

    Not really, though. They allow themselves to be tricked, and their diamond reserves in London, Frankfurt and Tel Aviv are of course full of conflict diamonds.

    You can only prevent the use of conflict diamonds in 2 ways. 1 make the diamonds yourself, and 2 get the diamonds from sources you control and make open to the public.

    I prefer the first way, really.

    We do not need to be mining natural diamonds for gem or other purposes anymore.
  • > The consumer diamond market has artificially high prices, and is controlled almost entirely by a single family in South Africa. They restrict or release supply as they see fit. It's like the oil cartel done right (from their point of view, I mean.)
    >

    And the OS. Controlled by a single-company cartel in the upper US. The restrict or release technology as they see fit. It's like government done right.
  • One practical use I can think of is for something other than a whole chip running at 500C.

    Localized high currents (only example I can think of is electrostatic discharge, but that's because silicon can't handle intentional high currents) would become more attainable if the substrate could handle short-term or even moderately-long-lived high temperatures without breaking down. Maybe not heating the entire chip up, but specific junctions/switches/gates/drivers being able to survive bursts of high current could be VERY useful..
  • Diamond age already? Weren't we supposed to have the genetic age first, or did I miss it? Can someone please plot out the civilization advances here -- I'm getting confused.
  • Ok I will then!

    tf=(tc+32)*1.8
    where
    tf=tempature faranhite
    tc=tempature celcius
    tf=(500+32)*1.8
    tf=532*1.8
    tf=957.6

    957 degrees faranheit is very VERY hot. Now I could take my little butane blowtorch lighter and test to see if it goes up that high, I know acetaline torches can cut through steel, but i'm sure they have to go way over 957 degrees to do it. Can someone confirm this for me?

    --toq

  • well, put it this way: for the first time, you and the wife will agree on what is a good gift. The first wearable computer that impresses her friends, and yours: you married her for better or for worse; why don't you let her know how it's going with The [glint/glitter] Beowulf Cluster.
  • Sounds great. And it is great from an academic standpoint. This is the kindo of things EE profesors can write papers on but it will never show up in industry and here's why.

    1. There is too much money already in silicon.

      we saw the same thing when GaAs first came out. "GaAs has better better transport properties" they whined but nothing ever came of it b/c Si had too much of a head start.

    2. process is harder

      Si has a great property -- it rusts (so to speak). Si+O2->SiO2. SiO2 is glass and an insulator so to create an insulator on silicon all ou have to do heat it up in oxygen. Diamond is an insulator when you remove all the dopants. How do you dope deep down into the crystal and leave an undoped (insulated) layer on top for a FET.

    3. It costs too much.

      It costs nearly $5billion to set up a fab when you know what you are doing. How much do you think it will cost when there are currently no machine manufatureres or even known proceses for a new material. No one will jump on the diamond bandwagon because the risk reward prospect is really bad.

  • but, but....that's not what diamonds are for! They're supposed to be in large rock form- on my hand! (well, in theory, one isn't NOW of course, but eventually--maybe)
    I mean, I guess it's good and all but-...I'm just going to be having some difficulties with this-nevermind, just ignore me... :(
  • ...not if you know what's good for you, i'd say! ;)
  • So don't bother buying a diamond engagement ring if you're getting married. In a decade they'll be free with a can of motor oil at Wal-mart.

    IANAEconomist, but if demand raises and supply stays the same, prices will rise, not fall.

  • I think Max Schreck was the (non-superpowered) bad guy in Batman Returns

  • Gemesis is a Florida company that is now producing large, gem-quality clear or colored diamonds.

    There's not much information on the Gemesis web site [gemesis.com], but a few weeks ago I remember watching a PBS Nova program entitled "The Diamond Deception" [pbs.org] about the quest for gem quality man-made diamonds. Gemesis contracted for Russian technology to produce what they claim are the best man-made diamonds in the world -- diamonds that can only be detected by a fluorescence test.

    The stones being produced are of such high quality that DeBeers is seriously concerned about the future of the diamond market.

  • When I was refering to the crystalography of diamond I wasn't refering to it's geometry relative to Si but more to its scale. Diamonds corresponding tunnels should be smaller which should prevent Cu from poisoning the crystal. Titanium would probably fit though, and of course this is all abstraction from courses I took a while back :). Anyway I was just leaving open the possibilty that there might be another weirder hole I can't visualize.

    I'm not terribly sure there's a lot of value in what I'm hoping is a clarification. :) But why not, right? When I refered to dislocations, I literally ment areas of imperfection in the crystal as opposed to the actual edge of a grain. Like a missing carbon atom, or a line where if you were looking at a sheet of atoms in the diamond it would look like someone ripped and slightly seperated the torn edge above and below the plane etc.

    At any rate we should get back to talking about diamond not some silly metal. It would be pretty interesting to see some high quality doped diamond, maybe with nitrogen.

  • diamonds will be "free with a can of motor oil" 10 years from now because the technology this guy is describing _will_ increase supply. Theoretically quite substantially so. That's assuming that these researchers can find processes to grow diamonds quickly enough to keep up with the demand, but if so -- well, like the guy says, jewelers are in trouble...
    -k
  • Nova even has a companion web site
    here [pbs.org]
    for their show "The Diamond Deception."

    (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/diamond/
    for those who worry about the goat...)
  • "thin film of diamond atoms" = "carbon" approx= "soot".

    So, dirty, grimy sooty eastern Europe was just ahead of its time?

  • Something to that effect (although I'm not sure which product you're referring to). You know, how common ingredients are highlighted and placed on a pedestal so that they can charge the consumer more (ie: Made with REAL Cheese!). I hate that, and that's what I fear the chip makers will do with this new diamond technology.
  • the "AOL Diamond" 6.0 with 700 free hours CD I got in the mail today?

  • Geology 101: Silicon née silicates are the primary components of the Earth's crust. You get a gold star. :)

    If you say it with a short "o" sound as opposed to the long "o" sound you get extra credit.

    If you know that silicone is the primary component of Pamela Lee Anderson then the whole class will sing a song to you. :)

    But I digress -- silicon is not nearly as durable as diamond. I am not going ga-ga over the idea of semiconductors that can withstand a blowtorch. What juices me are the applications for diamond-deposition technology -- scratch-proofing optics, hardening membranes, preserving surfaces, stuff like that.

    Now if we can only get a tech that allows us to diamond coat objects without exposing them to near vaccuum and extreme temperatures that would be ducky, especially for realatively fragile carbon-rich baubles like the Mona Lisa.

    Back to Ms. Anderson, she coats herself with diamonds through a process of well-documented reproductive efforts. :)

  • your conversion formula is wrong.

    tf=tc*1.8 + 32

    not that it really makes that much of a difference... 932 vs. 957.6.

    devon
  • Indymedia just seems to be a group of psychos complaining about how the world is unfair and we should boycot everything.

    Sorry for the misunderstanding of your roll into it. I do know that it is very difficult, even for a consortium to guarantee that all of the goods are in fact what you want and ordered, regardless of your chain. You have unethical employees (Bob, the inspector buys conflict diamonds, trades them out for roughly equivalent nonconflict diamonds and makes some cash on the exchange), and sometimes just accidents. I never hold any organization completely to blame for something, it usually always comes down to one or two people who made a wrong decision and often times continue that decision to save their dignity from admitting they were screwed up.

  • First off, I dont have a spelling problem I CANT SPELL!

    Secound, yes crays were super computers but since Compact bought the processor division of Cray when it fell apart. The processors now produced by the compact-cray division I call crays.

    Third the carbon scoring was deep into the diamond surface and not just soot!

    Fourth this is a very unique solution to multi processing that is not done by SGI (who used to own Cray), EMC, SUN. These super computers rely on switching protocals seperate from the processor bus to handel cache coherency. This method I descriped allows one to do a multy processing solution all on the same bus (beyoud 2 processors). Why is this allowed in the described situation, because by placing the pins on top of one another the bus length is very short compared to a normal bus layout thus creating the electrical properties to allow for a truly multy processing bus system.
  • As if having the ordinary problems of teenage kids wasn't bad enough, now am I going to have to worry about them joining the Drummers, as well as the more mundane problems of alcohol, drugs, smoking, gangs, car accidents, etc.
  • ...but at 500 C, it melted a hole right through my motherboard.

  • Kiss your cooling fan goodbye! (Score:4)

    by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Wednesday January 10, 2001 @12:46PM (#515973) Homepage Journal
    'Diamond chips' would be invaluable in electronic devices exposed to high temperatures. Semiconducting diamond works up to temperatures of 500 C -- silicon devices fail at around 150 C. So not only can you toss the cooling fan, you could use it as a mug warmer too! Seriously though, I wonder if an electronic circuit could work at 500 C. Something I remember from science class about resistance and heat rise together. Considering 0 is freezing and 100 is boiling, we're talking about heat on the magnitude of a small blowtorch. I'll be surprised if they can come out with a practical application for this. --toq
  • This is the second recent advance pertaining to diamonds. Jewlery quality diamonds can now be made in a cost effective way??5{ndustrial diamonds are created. If this becomes main stream i expect to see "bedazzler" to replace those cheap pieces of plastic with read diamonds soon.

    I think i read this at arstechnica [arstechnica.com] go check it out.

  • They don't know half of it (Score:5)

    by Deanasc ( 201050 ) on Wednesday January 10, 2001 @01:33PM (#515975) Homepage Journal
    I just did my senior thesis on synthetic diamond. The technology coming down the line is incredible.

    The Russians are doing gem quality diamonds 4 carets every 72 hours. They're also going to do LCD monitors that use almost no power (yet are bright and vivid without backlighting) out of diamond as well.

    Simple doping already gives np switching with rough diamond films such as the one shown in the article.

    So don't bother buying a diamond engagement ring if you're getting married. In a decade they'll be free with a can of motor oil at Wal-mart.

  • Who will be in charge? (Score:3)

    by programic ( 139404 ) on Wednesday January 10, 2001 @12:48PM (#515976)
    So will DeBeer's take charge of all the processors? I can only imagine what prices will be like then.
  • The first place this looks useful is high temperature engine components. Not just sensors, but controllers, and other circuit components.

    I wonder what the maximum low temperature would be. But in any case, anything that significantly expands the range of the operating temperature is going to be useful.

    Currently, (I have heard) a typical CPU pulls enough power through that one or two square inches of ceramic to power a sixty watt light bulb. With that kind of power (to 500 degrees) inside of a regular computer box, well that might get a bit dangerous for use in the average home.

    Boxen glowing from heat would not do well in wooden homes.

  • Skyscrapers need to be able to sway in the wind. I believe the tallest of skyscrapers are designed to sway as much as three feet if I remember correctly. A diamond frame skyscraper would snap off and crush a huge hunk of a city. Then again, I'm no architect. I could be way off.
  • acetylene torches don't cut steal directly, they heat it up first, and then you push a lever to blow pure oxygen at the hot spot and it oxidizes on the spot, and blows away.
  • It could make "cut & paste" a lot easier!
  • actually, it's safer: you can fall 499 floors from a 500 story building without injury. Fall even 25 measly floors from the 25 story building you mentioned and you are dead.
  • This is a step in the right direction, but not quite the beginning of the Diamond Age. Note that the layers only become useful once they were about 30 microns across -- quite large in comparison to the finest scale structures of less than a micron available in today's state-of-the-art silicon microelectronics.

    Stephenson envisioned building diamond atom-by-atom all the way up to macroscopic dimensions. In principle, such techniques would eliminate defects entire, but this method is a far cry from it.
  • Wife: Aww, honey.. It's been so long since you've held my hand. You're so sweet.

    Husband: Actually, I'm reading firewall logs from the home network.

    Or maybe:

    Wife: I just love it when you wisper sweet nothings into my ear.. But what are you saying?

    Husband: ls... cd bin...
  • That's for natural diamonds (those you see in rings and such). These new diamond-chips would use (as stated in the article) the synthetic process that is used to make the cheap industrial-grade diamonds. Your facts are still correct, though.

    Kurdt
  • If it had sufficiently concentrated and pure carbon at its core... which isn't very likely.

  • <OT intensity=very>

    Max Schreck [imdb.com] was the original Nosferatu.

    </OT>

  • Something I remember about a physics prof saying that a carbon-filament lightbulb has a reverse temperature coefficient of resistance, so that as the bulb heats up the resistance goes down.... I wonder if diamond has this property too.
  • please sir, before flaming for spelling errors, make sure you don't misspell one of the very words you're trying to correct him on... :)
    'coolant' not 'coolent'
    i'm not a grammar or spelling nazi, but don't go flaming someone when you turn around and make the same mistake yourself.
  • It was at the end of 2063: Odyssey Three.
  • Does that mean I could like have an uptime of like 500 years? ;-)

    Only if you have a gem of an OS!

    J

  • Gem quality diamonds have been in production for several years thanks to our Russian friends. Just say a PBS show about it. And yes, De Beers is having a freak fest.
  • Duh! I should have known that. But per the imdb, it was Walkens' characters name too. Obviously Burton got the name from Nosferatu though...

  • Modern (i.e. Since the 1950s) engineers already know how to build steel framed structures over a mile high; no need for diamond. The only problem (besides funding) is that the taller you make the building, the more people need to go up, and the mor people that need to go up the more elevators you need. Before you know it your whole building is elevator shafts.

    Frank Lloyd Wright designed a mile high building to be built in Chicago in the 50's, and they didn't build it for this exact reason.

    PovRay rendering of mile high building [povray.org]

    More images [primenet.com]

    Was the mile high building in Star Wars Episode 1? [fortunecity.com]

  • Without having read the original Appl. Phys. Rev. article, I fail to see what all the fuss is about. It has been possible to grow hetero-epitaxial (100) diamond on silicon, again using bias-enhanced nucleation, for some years now. these films often give a far smoother and more cohesive appearance than that belonging to the image reproduced in the Nature article. Silicon wafers are a reasonably cheap commodity these days, much more so than single crystal iridium, I'd suggest.
  • Can you say "skyscraper support beams"? We may not have this before nanotech, but once we have the ability to place carbon atoms exactly where we want to (on a large scale), expect to see 500-story towers that many of its inhabitants would never need leave. I just hope they outlaw dropping things from the roof...
  • This is a pretty cool advancement. Since diamonds will be able to withstand high temperatures and high voltage, semiconductors can be taken to the next level.

    Great since diamonds are a girls best friend, maybe (when, and if I get married) I could give my gf a CPU made from diamonds.

    No Honey, I didn't get you a ring! This is better, trust me!!! LOL
  • ...to implode Jupiter into a sun. During the process, millions of metric tons of C60 will be thrown throughout our galaxy, which we can then collect to use for building processors.
    Typical short-term solution. Jupiter is a cosmic vacuum cleaner, so it absorbs a lot of comets that would otherwise endanger Earth. If we blow up Jupiter, we'll have to use the carbon to give everyone on Earth a diamond coating so they'd survive an impact event. And we'd have to use lots more on diamond drills so holes could be made to cater to man's procreative/eliminative needs. Then we'd need more carbon to plug the hole that was left so it wouldn't make a draught. Projections indicate we'd run out of carbon in thirty-two years, four months.
    So go ahead. Blow up Jupiter. But you'll be condemning humanity to forever going without sex or urination.

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