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Japan Developing Diamond-based Semiconductors 226

Posted by michael from the boy's-best-friend dept.
s spencer and others wrote in with submissions about Japan funding the development of diamond-based semiconductors to replace silicon chips. The main advantages of diamond include heat resistance and higher electrical resistance.
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Japan Developing Diamond-based Semiconductors More

Japan Developing Diamond-based Semiconductors

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  • pentium iii (Score:3, Funny)

    by circletimessquare ( 444983 ) <circletimessquar ... il.com minus cat> on Friday December 27, 2002 @12:33PM (#4967065) Homepage Journal
    pentium iii=mitsubishi?

  • engagement present... (Score:3, Funny)

    by jkcity ( 577735 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @12:33PM (#4967070) Homepage
    I heard in asia that people give mobile phones with diamonds in them as engagement rpesents, so maybe they are taking a stab at the engagement market :)>
  • Computer recycling may have a chance after all ... how many circuits do you have to kill for an engagement ring?

  • Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rayonic ( 462789 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @12:35PM (#4967085) Homepage Journal
    "Pentiums are a girl's best friend"?

    Okay, that's not funny. Taking off Score +1 Bonus.

  • Great. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Diamond based semiconductors? Joy, we're returning to the days of the overly expensive CPU...

  • The girlfriend should be happy about this... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PhotonSphere ( 193108 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @12:36PM (#4967096) Homepage Journal

    She's been pushing for a diamond for a little while now - I wonder if she'll be upset if she gets it in chip form rather than the traditional ring?

  • Breakthrough (Score:2, Funny)

    by Mr2cents ( 323101 )
    This is a breakthrough in wearable computers!

  • Heh (Score:2, Funny)

    by ramirez ( 51663 )
    I would say "yes," but why does the ring say "Intel Inside?"
  • Moore's Law's funeral will have to be postponed for a little while longer yet again.

    • hmmmm...maybe. We still don't know what the raw performance of these dia-chips will be. No doubt you are thinking "oh, 1000 degC, that is great for overclocking." But do you really want the equivalent of a blast furnace on your desktop? And, what kind of logic board and surface traces will be able to manage that kind of heat? The answer is, none at all.

      These are very special duty devices. They will end up in the exhaust manifold of your car, not the logic board of your PC. They will be built and deployed to resist failure under heat, and might not run even as fast as what you can buy today; clock speed will probably not even make it into the requirements document.

      So this is no answer to Moore's Law, more like Murphy's Law; trying to get something that is far less likely to go wrong in places where traditional chips go wrong all the time. Thus we can extend the technology we know well (digital computing) into new places (harsh environments.) It will be interesting to see what they do with that...launch a compact space probe into the corona of the sun? Drop one into an erupting volcano to float around and send data? Lots of stuff comes to mind.

      But not overclocking.
  • The main disadvantages include the fact that diamonds are terribly expensive :)

    • Re:Disadvantages (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I saw a show on PBS about diamonds one time. It turns out that they are relatively inexpensive, but the major diamond producers will deliberately limit quantity produced to keep the price up. Also, what kind of diamonds are they using. Industrial diamonds are relatively cheep, as any one who has a nice set of diamond files will tell you.

      • Re:Disadvantages (Score:3, Informative)

        by esonik ( 222874 )
        These chips will not be based on cut diamond wafers in the way today chips are based on cut silicon wafers because it's pretty much impossible to cut diamond. Rather they would be based on evaporated diamond films (like the SOI - Silicon On Insulator - technique).
        The fact that diamond is more suitable at higher temperatures is due to it's large band-gap: 5.5 eV (Si has 1.1 eV). So even at high temperature diamond is an (very good) isolator (very pure Si is also an good isolator at room temperature but it gets a lot more conductive at higher temperatures due to its small band gap). This large band-gap is also the reason why diamond would be a candidate for UV LEDs or lasers (UV starts at about 3eV). OTOH, Silicon with 1.1eV is in the infrared. BTW, the 235nm radiation they mention in the article corresponds to ~5.2 eV.

    • Re:Disadvantages (Score:4, Informative)

      by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @12:48PM (#4967196) Homepage Journal
      Actually diamonds are neither rare nor intrinsically valuable. The only reason that they cost so much at the jewelry store is because of the monopoly of debeers. They pretty much control all the diamonds in the world. if they wanted they could manufacture diamonds out of coal instead of mining them. It is not a lack of supply that makes them expensive but the fact that one company controls all the supply.

      Diamonds are expensive for the same reason that Win2k costs $200 per seat. Actually, I prefer emeralds myself.

      • Re:Disadvantages (Score:4, Informative)

        by Fulcrum of Evil ( 560260 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @01:21PM (#4967457)

        if they wanted they could manufacture diamonds out of coal instead of mining them

        Not just yet. Other companies have manufactured diamonds, but they get cloudy after a few years. When this gets solved, you'll hear about it.

        • Wrong, wrong, wrong.

          Diamonds have been perfectly maufactured, but Debeers somehow can control the amount that are made per year to create artificial demand. Also Debeers puts IDs on the diamonds to make them "authentic."

          Even if manufacture isn't perfect, this isn't for looks, it's for electrical use.

      • Diamonds are expensive for the same reason that Win2k costs $200 per seat

        Uh, no. Artificial diamonds look wrong. And natural diamonds cannot be compared with a human product like Win2K.

        • Uh, no. Artificial diamonds look wrong.

          De Beers is planning to (or may already) etch a tiny hallmark on their diamonds because some artificial ones are now indistinguishable. (Saw this on a documentary a few months ago, so I think trustworthy.) Anyway, to a layman zircon is indistinguishable, so "look wrong" is somewhat an exaggeration, or falling for De Beers' mystique.

        • Re:Disadvantages (Score:3, Informative)

          by MojoRilla ( 591502 )
          Artificial diamonds most certaintly do not "look wrong".

          According to the NOVA [pbs.org] program "Diamond Deception" originally broadcast on 2/01/2000, "These synthetic diamonds are such good copies of the real thing that they not only have the identical atomic structure but can even replicate their flaws."
  • Isn't that a bad thing? It would increase power requirements, create heat, etc. Even if a diamond chip could stand that, not everything else in the box can - not to mention being a problem for laptop batteries.
  • ...the jewelry store?

    please tell me we're going to start seeing OEM Jewelers popping up now... retail prices are murder!

  • I thought that we had reached the limitations of linear computing.... such as the height of moore's law..

  • quick thoughts (Score:5, Funny)

    by greechneb ( 574646 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @12:39PM (#4967120) Journal
    I'm glad they waited until after I bought an engagement ring...

    Intel may now become the United States largest diamond importer.

    Just as long as the jewelry store doesn't put up a sign saying "Intel Insides Inside"
    • I'm glad they waited until after I bought an engagement ring...

      What? You didn't know all women are already networked in a huge, anti-guy conspiracy? Well, that certainly takes the ca
      [NO CARRIER]

  • Just when you think nothing can be more expensive than a Pentium processor (as compared to athlons) they invent a way.

    And what the @#^%#? I go to check prices and a Athlon XP 2700 333 costs almost as much as a P4 2.8 ghz.

    What you don't want to buy a diamond Pentium 5? Too bad thats all that Dell and Gateway sells and you must buy a diamond cd of WindowsXP SE, all for the remarkable low price of 6,000 dollars.
  • There's no way enough diamonds in the world to do this....

    Women will be pissed....LOL
  • There are ways to synthetically create diamonds; which are worth nothing in the jewelry market. but then again what geek wouldnt buy a 14k diamond for his love?
  • As I recall, one of the ways to utterly destroy a diamond is to run an excess amount of current through it. So, if you try to overclock your diamond chip, could you vaporize it? What about current overloads caused by over heating or bad power supply? Could be interesting.
    • So, if you try to overclock your diamond chip, could you vaporize it?

      Nah; most of it would just reconfigure as graphite, except at the surface.

      There is a problem with overly-warm diamonds in an oxygen atmosphere: Occasionally, a C atom will join up with a passing O2 molecule and they'll wander off together. This doesn't happen with diamond rings, because the temperature required would be high enough that you'd pull the ring off. But it is a worry in a chip that you want to last for years. But it's easy enough to prevent. You just cover exposed diamond surfaces with a layer of something that blocks the oxygen. Gold will do quite nicely.

  • The main advantages of diamond include heat resistance and higher electrical resistance.


    And of course the relative abundance of it and extreme low cost.

    Practicality anyone?

    • The more than something costs, the more practical refining lower quality ore or synthetics becomes. You do it on too large of a scale, however, and you flood the market, and you can't make a profit, so it's a fairly delicate balance.

      There may also be advances in detection technology, collection, or other factors that'll result in more expense, but with it, greater abundance.

      I mean, think about it... scientists and environmentalists keep talking about how we're going to run out of fossil fuels, but they always seem to keep extending out the critical date... It most likely will run out sooner or later, but the oil companies will keep finding a way to prolong it to make a profit as long as they can.
    • actualy diamonds are abundant, its just that the ones good enough to make a ring out of are very rare , the majority of diamonds they pull out of the ground are ether too yellow or are not shaped properly making them useless for anything other then sand paper
  • this will be a better plan if someone can bust the debeers monopoly, and make diamonds a semi-precious stone.
    • A quick look at the industry says that manufactured diamonds are within probably a decade or two of being honestly competative, and then another decade or two after that for them to be "accepted", or thought of by the masses as not being 'less than' natural diamonds.

      If this takes off, it will likely help manufactured diamonds' cause, as their demand will be significantly higher (and manufactured diamonds' main problem, color, is irrelevant when being used for industry and not jewlery)
      • Yeah. That is correct. But diamonds would be "cheap" tomorrow if DeBeers didn't hold its monopoly.
      • Quoth the poster:
        A quick look at the industry says that manufactured diamonds are within probably a decade or two of being honestly competative, and then another decade or two after that for them to be "accepted"

        Depends on the market you are looking at. Synthetic diamond is the "Gold Standard" for many industrial applications and has been for the last 12-15 years. This is because synthetic diamonds, which are manufactured under highly controlled conditions have much more predictable properties than natural stones and they can be made in forms (e.g. polycrystalline "sheets" for facing cutters on rock bits) that just aren't available in natural diamond.
    • I'd like to know when Fabrage will introduce the Egg based server.

  • The main advantages of diamond include heat resistance and higher electrical resistance.

    Resistance is ... useful?

    I can barely imagine the ThermalTake Volcanoes for these things...

    • Re:Resistance (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      heat tolerance is important as the power dissipated is impressive with today's chips. Due to diamond's rather large bandgap, heat tolerance is a better than Si. Resistance is also useful. I'd imagine creating a MOSFET with a leaky gate is problematic. Part of the reason that BJTs dominated in the early days of the semiconductor industry is the lack of a suitable substance as an insulator between the gate and the channel. I'm thinking the researchers are referring to diamond's natural ability in undoped form to resist current flow, so that's one less obstacle to overcome.
  • If the CPU is a diamond, I can just jam it in there with all the force I want!
  • WIll women have to buy a man a diamond now... look honey slip on this motherboard, awww it fit's perfect, *on knees* will you marry me?

  • "up to 1,000 degrees Celsius" (Score:5, Funny)

    by burgburgburg ( 574866 ) <splisken06NO@SPAMemail.com> on Friday December 27, 2002 @12:47PM (#4967182)
    "Diamond chips can work at a temperature of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, while silicon chips stop working above 150 degrees Celsius"

    Imagine the overclocking!

  • Tell me, when we reach temperatures that will make Si melt :)

    I thought the main advantage of diamond over Si is a better heat conductance.
    • You are correct, the artical wasn't very clear from a technical standpoint. C has better heat conductance so it can "resist" high temperatures and voltages more easily than silicon. They didn't mean resistance in an electrical context.

  • Now the diamond conglomerates will face extreme pressure to quit artificially inflating and regulating the cost of diamonds..
  • Diamonds are a geeks best friend
  • With these low interest rates I could take out a second mortgage for that new processor.

    /me heads over to ditech.com

  • Another case of life imitating art... or at least catching up with it. To anyone interested in nanotechnology, I suggest reading the Neal Stephenson book "The Diamond Age" [everything2.com].

  • I don't know if they will be able to find enough of those diamond flecks (what they cut off while making REAL diamonds). It seems like people these days are buying more and more of that ghetto jewelry with diamond flecks. They might need to use the synthetic diamond material that is use in diamond cutting edges....
  • I'd hate to pay for a beowulf cluster of those!!!

  • Did this... Star Wars Research in 80's (Score:4, Interesting)

    by snatchitup ( 466222 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @12:57PM (#4967266) Homepage Journal
    When I was at Auburn, we had Star Wars funding to look into this. We had created a diode that switched at 2000 celcius.

    The idea was to have IC circuits right inside the rocket engines.

  • One of the most important properties of silicon is the easy to form (both in thickness and control of growth rate) and stable oxide.

    Most of an integrated circuit is not active, and just exists for alignment errors and isolation of deplition regions.

    I really doubt that Diamond dioxide will be as easy to form as Silicon dioxide.
  • Pentiums are forever????
  • Wait a minute...

    The main advantages of diamond include heat resistance and higher electrical resistance.

    This seems to be going quite in the opposite direction of superconductor research and what most people generally think of as sound design principles - less electrical resistance means a more efficient contraption, right? So what gives? I can't get to the article from here given my Christmas-reduced bandwidth, but is this a Slashdot misprint or is this the truth; and if it's real, then what gives? Why is higher electrical resistance suddenly an advantage?
    • I've said this already, but the article was confusing. They meant diamond has a can withstand higher temp. and voltage, not that it was higher resistance in an electrical sense. Their use of resistance had nothing to do with Ohm's Law. I guess the author didn't know about the way the phrase is generally used in electronics.

      Also, they are talking about semiconductors, not superconductors. Very different beasts.
    • conduction is the opposite of resistance. Hence a semi-conductor could be called a semi-resistor, so to speak.

      Indeed diamonds are not semi-conductors but complete insulators and they dont pass current. Its rather bizarre but micro-electronics is not of the hardest classes. Its really a physics class to do with electron migration...
      • All useful semiconductors are actually semi-insulators: you need doping and bias to promote electrons to the conduction band. In fact, semiconductors are sometimes characterized by their "bandgap voltage" which means how much voltage is required to promote an electron from the valence band, where it is tightly held to the lattice, and the conduction band, where it can move freely as part of an electrical current. The thing that makes diamond withstand high temperatures and voltages, its high bandgap, is also on of the things that makes it hard to work with.
    • very high resistance is good for the substrate, upon which you place your doped (conductive) materials for active components, and metals for "wires"....this keeps current leakage down.

  • One thing they didn't mention... (Score:5, Informative)

    by crgrace ( 220738 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @01:01PM (#4967296)
    There is (at least) one key advantage silicon has over diamond (or any semiconductor except Germanium). It has a self-repairing crystal lattice. When dopant atoms (phosphorous, arsenic, etc.) are injected into the bulk silicon wafer using ion implantation (diffusion not used in practice too much anymore) they cause structural damage to the crystal lattice which would hurt circuit performace. However, Silicon has this magical property that if you heat it up to the right temperature (several hundred degrees Celcius) the lattice begins to reorganize itself to incorporate the dopant atoms without damage. Tis process is called Annealing and it is one of the key reasons Silicon became the dominant semiconductor (the other was the availability of a good thermal oxide, SiO2).

    Diamond does not have this desirable property, so a lot of research will have to go into maintaining the quality of the crystal lattice.

  • News was thin (Score:3, Informative)

    by mugnyte ( 203225 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @01:03PM (#4967311) Journal
    Here's some background on diamond films: [wisc.edu]
    In July of this year, scientists in the United States reported that isotopically pure diamond films (containing 99.9% carbon-12 and not the 1% carbon-13 that is present in natural diamonds) had been grown. The pure films not only conducted hear 50% better than the best natural diamonds but also withstood damage by laser radiation ten times more effectively than natural diamond.

    One could have the concept of combining functions: Glass that serves as a semiconductor, etc. Interesting.

    I don't know if manufactured diamonds theaten the jewelry industry, but I doubt it. Although hundreds of almost-slaves labor in mines so deep it's scary, and the industry is full of creepy deals [cnn.com], people buy them, and the industry churns them out [diamondregistry.com] just the same.

    mug

  • Complete solution? (Score:3, Informative)

    by brejc8 ( 223089 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @01:07PM (#4967350) Homepage Journal
    Yes Diamonds are better than Silicon but:

    You still cannot get past some limmiting factors like speed of light and the absolute minnimum structure size.

    What the Japanease are looking into will be very large chips. Diamonds are the only good way to get a good yeilds of these. But still when you have a 10x10mm 100 GHz chip it takes several clock cycles to get some information from one side of the chip to the other.

    Normal design methodologies will no longer work in the near future just like they are starting to get difficult now. (Moore's Law slowing down)
  • When I die maybe I can become a CPU! Thanks to intel and lifegems http://www.lifegems.com Maybe Intel will want to buy grandpa when he croaks. In the future you'll be able to get a faster processor everytime a loved one dies!

  • Gratuitous misogynist comments (Score:4, Funny)

    by YellowSnow ( 569705 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @01:15PM (#4967407)
    I got my girl a diamond earing so she had some processing power above the neck.
    Now SHE wants a beowulf cluster of these.
    • I got my girl a diamond earing so she had some processing power above the neck.

      Oh females have tons of processing power above the neck. It's just that they have different logic gates.

      Men have logic gates like AND, OR, NAND, NOR, and XOR.

      Women have logic gates like SOMETIMES, MAYBE, OCCATIONALLY, THE-OPPOSITE-OF-LAST-TIME, WHAT-DAY-OF-THE-MONTH-IS-IT, READ-MY-MIND-DAMNIT, OOOH!PRETTY-ROCKS!, and many others that no one has been able to figure out yet.

      -
  • The main advantages of diamond include heat resistance and higher electrical resistance.

    And a certain BLING, BABY!

  • Diamond Data (Score:4, Informative)

    by notestein ( 445412 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @01:41PM (#4967614) Homepage Journal
    The idea of using diamond as a semiconductor has been kicking around for years with quite a bit of research being done world wide.

    Technology Research News has an article [trnmag.com] published in September that discusses this.

    Among other things they mention that diamond's charge carrier mobility is three times better.

    Diamond transistors could in theory deliver one watt of power at 100 gigahertz, or billion cycles per second, said Isberg. This is five times faster has been achieved using the semiconductor Gallium Arsenide.

    Diamond-based electronics would also be better than existing semiconductor materials for high-temperature applications, said Isberg. Diamond conducts heat 15 times more efficiently than silicon, and therefore cools faster.

    etc. etc.

  • We cue the pseudo-gangsta asian kid saying "Even mah pc is iced out FOOOL!"

  • Uh oh... (Score:2, Funny)

    by c_monster ( 124327 )
    How will we tell the people from the machines if we can't refer to them as carbon-based and silicon-based life anymore?

  • Some diamond facts. (Score:3, Informative)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Friday December 27, 2002 @02:07PM (#4967866)
    - Diamonds, as used in jewelry, are artificially rare. That's right.. the rock on your engagement ring is only rare because DeBeers & friends keep millions and millions of diamonds locked up in vaults. This is not conspiracy theory... it's a verifiable fact.

    - The average cost of diamond, if all diamonds available were in circulation, instead of in vaults, would be about $1.50 per ct.

    - Small diamonds, the kind used in diamond saws, industry, etcetera, are NOT expensive, like your engagement ring. Small diamonds are common and cheap, because they have no real jewelry market. Diamond impregnated stones and blades cost more because it costs more to manufacture them.. not because of the diamond.

    - Good luck convincing your girl of ANY of this. You still have to buy that rock. Get over it..

  • How else can two months' salary last forever?
  • And you guys thought they couldn't find a way to make computers really expensive again!

  • The main advantages of diamond (Score:3, Funny)

    by Hubert_Shrump ( 256081 ) <[cobranet] [at] [gmail.com]> on Friday December 27, 2002 @02:34PM (#4968093) Journal
    ...include... higher electrical resistance.

    Is that all it takes? I have lots of stuff here that might be groundbreaking...

    World awed by carpet-based semiconductor

  • I wonder how they're going to replace SiO2 as an insulator. With silicon, if you want an insulator, you just add oxygen and heat a bit and you get an SiO2 (glass) layer, which is a good insulator. With Carbon (diamond), all you'd get is CO2, which is pretty useless (not to mention anti-Kyoto). They'll need a good (and cheap) insulator for carbon, don't remember what they did for GaAs, though...
  • I thought everyone knew that the favorite gem of the Japanese was the Ruby! [ruby-lang.org]
  • "This property means that diamond chips can work at a much higher frequency or faster speed and be placed in a high-temperature environment, such as a vehicle's engine..." ... or an Athlon machine.
  • Diamond chips can work at a temperature of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, while silicon chips stop working above 150 degrees Celsius,

    Yep. I can just see it now. Camouflaging my 4 processer server as a hot-plate. Problem is, when I set my computer to 'simmer' quake goes down to 158 frames/second.

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