Diamond semiconductors 81 GHz!

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
hergieburbur

hergieburbur

Distinguished
Dec 19, 2005
1,907
0
19,780
While large scale production is easily a decade or more in the future, there has been a sudden interest in these lab-created diamonds. With Moore's Law running into thermal problems on one hand and quantum problems on the other, a switch to the novel, sparkly material could drive computing power to unheard of levels. Already, experimental diamond transistors have been clocked at 81GHz. For comparison, Intel demonstrated cutting-edge silicon transistors in a lab late last year--running at 10GHz.

Researchers at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT) have set their sights on a transistor that runs at 200GHz while dissipating 30W/mm², and they believe impurities are the only thing holding them back. Apollo's process would remove even that barrier, making the purest diamond physically possible.
Click to expand...

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Aug/gee20030827021485.htm

Talk about an advancement in a GHz war, it would be amazing to see this technology utilized, and with the cheap manufacturing of the diamonds,

But small Florida-based Gemesis is causing a global shake-up in the diamond market, having recently announced a process than can produce large, gem-quality diamonds for as little as US$5 using heat and pressure.
Click to expand...

they could make proc's faster and cheaper than ever before

very interesting stuff

It wasn't even news back in 2003 that crystaline carbon formations (diamonds, carbon nanotubes, etc) have the potential to form far better transistors than Silicon. Didn't you ever see the movie or read the book Congo? J/K :lol: Seriously though, some of my old college profs and their associates have benn working on that stuff for years, and it has very little to do with the GHz wars as it will be at the minimum a decade before we would see this in anything but high-end servers.

There are other materials that are already better. Germanium (I think), is better for mission critical apps, as it has a lower voltage threshold (0.5 vs 0.7 I think, this is going pretty far back in the college days), and is more resistant to electrical interferance. However, it is more expensive and has other drawbacks for widespread use.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom