It looks like De Beers, the bastards that artificially inflate diamond prices by holding back supply, may finally have met their match. Wired has an article about a couple of different methods of mass producing diamonds. The stones will be so inexpensive that they may even be used in semiconductors:
Still, Butler is frustrated with what he thinks of as myopia in the US computer business. “Europe and Japan have been investing in diamond semiconductor research,” he says, citing the Japanese government’s announcement in December that it would begin allocating $6 million a year to build a first-generation diamond chip. “Bob Linares has given the US the advantage, but nobody’s paying any attention,” he says. “If we’re not careful, the Japanese or the Europeans are going to claim the diamond niche.”
Indeed, Intel’s top materials executives weren’t aware of the latest research breakthroughs when I spoke to them in June, although they certainly understood the potential for diamonds in computing. “Diamonds represent a seismic change in semiconductors,” says Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, Intel’s director of communications circuits research. “It takes us about 10 years to evaluate a new material. We have a lot of investment in silicon. We’re not about to abandon that.”
But someday, that’s exactly what chipmakers will be forced to do. Just ask Bernhardt Wuensch, an MIT professor of materials science. “If Moore’s law is going to be maintained, processors are going to get hotter and hotter,” he tells me. “Eventually, silicon is just going to turn into a puddle. Diamond is the solution to that problem.”
Looks like I have some research to do…I haven’t heard of chip R&D with diamonds. I thought that Carbon NanoTubes was the sh*t! Perhaps there in a need for Carbon NanoTubes coupled with diamonds.
I read that article a few weeks ago. I joked around w/ my girlfriend about getting her a five carat man-made diamond ring. We’re talking about getting married and also buying a house, so $$$ is a big concern to me. It’s up to her though. She’s not all into materialistic s**t anyway…
You’re lucky to have a woman who’s not all caught up in that diamond BS. People spend so much loot on weddings & rings… money which could be better spent on a down paymet for a crib or something. And you guys are in Cali too, right? go with the house down payment
she gets a bit ahead of herself. I have to be the voice of reason and I get get s**t because of it. “I just want to look.”