Japanese boffins slice semiconductors from diamonds – with lasers! Scientists at Japan's Chiba University claim they've developed a method that uses lasers to create diamond wafers that could one day power next-gen semiconductors. Silicon remains the prime material for semiconductors, but diamonds are attractive because carbon in diamond form has a rather wide bandgap. A wide bandgap allows …
The diamond is the semiconductor.
Don't worry, nobody's cutting up the Crown Jewels any time soon, these diamonds are grown using chemical vapor deposition.
I've seen diamond FETs in operation in the lab. It's going to open up some fun new tech once the boffins get a good handle on it.
Oh boy, the RGB crowd is gonna go nuts with this. Bling-bling through and through.
Imagine that, 30-billion-transistor-9000-carat-chips, with gold-plated coolers, the Kim Kardashian of PCs is gonna be born within 10 years!
"Oh I spent 30000 quid on this new shiny Intel 20th generation diamond Core i11!"
The corresponding memory sticks are already already available
One big problem with diamond semiconductors is finding good dopants to get the good electronic performance. The dopant has to squeeze into the very strong lattice of the diamond crystal. I think the timeline for commercialization is optimistic. SiC took a full two decades to mature, diamond is even more difficult.
Been solved literally decades ago, the semiconductor properties of diamond have been well known for a long time and diamond devices are far from novel in a research setting. Just various practical problems prevent widespread commercial deployment. You wouldn't want to use these for generic computer chips, the higher bandgap implies a higher operating voltage meaning higher operating voltages and heat generation, although on the flip side diamond is one hell of a thermal conductor.
This is more power electronics as the article implies. Among the things that immediately come to mind if they may finally displace thermionic valves for high power radio and TV transmitters - semiconductors can be high power or high frequency, they still can't match valves for both at the same time.
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