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NTT Verifies Diamond Semiconductor Operation At 81 GHz
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Aug 25, 2003 11:50 PM
from the ooh-shiny dept.
from the ooh-shiny dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "This story over at eetimes.com reports of a semiconductor made of diamond that is able to run at 81 GHz." Mmmm, foreshadowing.
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Gamer Heaven...er Hell (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gamer Heaven...er Hell (Score:5, Funny)
What's up with that!?
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Re:Gamer Heaven...er Hell (Score:4, Insightful)
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Geeks want to know... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Geeks want to know... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Geeks want to know... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Geeks want to know... (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, the preseident of the latter of the two companies was at a diamond conference and was told by a DeBeers fellow that what he was doign was a good way to get a bullet in the head!
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Re:Geeks want to know... (Score:5, Informative)
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Hmm. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know about that. I'm sure I'd be somewhat wary of having one of these chips in a laptop dissipating 30W/mm a few inches from *my* crotch. ;)
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M$ Released new bloatware to slow it down... (Score:5, Funny)
Diamonds (Score:5, Funny)
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
"But it's an 18 carat Intel, darling!" - "WHACK"
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Or, conversely, now you can reduce a man to tears with the gift of a diamond.
Schwab
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Memory? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm imagining something like Dante's level 7 cache or something.
Re:Memory? (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine 1GB of processor core clock speed memory. That would be friggin amazing for databases
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Re:Memory? (Score:5, Informative)
At the sort of frequencies we're currently using, circuit tracks look more like inductors and capacitors than bits of wires. They essentially act as antennas, and there is a massive amount of effort spent in trying to avoid those effects.
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Re:Memory? (Score:5, Informative)
Another reason is that SRAM is used in a CPU for cache - its VERY fast but takes up more silicon per bit and is very expensive per bit.
Main memory is generally made of DRAM which is slower but also much smaller so you can get a much larger amount of memory onto a chip and much cheaper.
It's not that the latest technology isn't used in memory, it's just that its very expensive so it's used within the CPU as a cache while main memory will be slower in order to balance space vs cost for the machine to still be both affordable and usable.
Once the price drops, the cache technology gets put into main memory and a newer faster one replaces it in the cache.
The other big thing is that most of the advances in CPU speed are not due to the chip tecnology but due to design, especially pipelining.
CPUs go through a series of stages (eg fetch-read-execute) and the CPU can take advantage of this by running each stage while the next stage is still running.
This trick can't be taken advantage of in memory as memory does not contain several stages - hence pipelining increased cpu speed by something in the region of 5-10x while not increasing memory speed at all.
It's mainly new design tricks like this that have made most of the speed advances, which is why processor speed increases at such a larger rate than memory speed.
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Re:Memory? (Score:5, Informative)
The typical SRAM structure is a 6T circuit (That is 6 transistors), while DRAM is 1T. DRAMS does however need to be refreshed with regular intervals as the capacitor that stores the bit is prone to leakage. This means the DRAM can never idle at virtually 0 power consumption.
SRAMs therefore consume a lot less power than DRAMs when there are significant idle cycles.
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Re:Memory? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm betting we'll see 1Ghz memory(not effective via DDR or QDR, I'm talking actual bus frequency) within 1 year from this day.
Anyone wanna take my money?
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speed is no longer the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Making CPUs faster is all very nice, but the deciding point in purchasing an AMD vs Intel CPU in a couple of years may very well be in how much electricity it uses, even more so than how fast it is.
Re:speed is no longer the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Also it is MUCH easier that doing a full "suspend" (powering down PCI cards and peripherals) because you don't have to reinitialize all that stuff when you wake up.
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Re:speed is no longer the point (Score:4, Informative)
Mobile processors can usually alter their clock on the fly, but this requires tight intergration with the motherboard circuitry which is traditionally responsible for generating the CPU clock (which could probably also be programmed to overclock).
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Re:speed is no longer the point (Score:5, Informative)
One on the main causes of heating in semiconductors is the switching performance. Whilst a transistor is "on", voltage accross it is zero (or near to), current high, power dissipation (equals voltage * current) is low. Whilst a transistor is "off", voltage accross it is high, current is zero, power dissipation low. However, during the transition from on/off, voltage and current levels are both intermediate, hence power dissipation occurs. Faster switching response times means less dissipation during switching.
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Re:speed is no longer the point (Score:4, Interesting)
With Prescott set to top 100 watts, I think we've hit the limit of what desktop users are willing to tolerate. We're into "can't run it on summer afternoons" territory already. I've been using my laptop at home because of it.
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Wow a 3 to 300 ghz signal with high output. (Score:4, Interesting)
Killing devices like the star drek phaser is not that far off. The high energy output potential because of the thermal characteristics is scarry! Just imagine if the output of a cell phone could have a signal db and directional capable antenna. Yipes you could get scrambled brains if the antenna was too close. The radar and remote sensor applications for this could kick current US stealth tech out the window as well.
Hey honey! (Score:5, Funny)
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? (Score:5, Informative)
"Funny" moderation (Score:5, Insightful)
Will DeBeers be the new RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)
As I see it, there are one of only two outcomes here:
#1) Someone finds a way to make cheap diamonds, and DeBeers goes after them (in more ways than just the legal route) to make sure that #2 happens.
which brings me to
#2) Nobody finds a way to make cheap diamonds, and DeBeers can triple their prices. Of course, the diamond supply is already kept artifically low to drive up prices, so meeting this new demand won't be a problem at all (it'll just cost you the price of a small car to buy a CPU.)
I don't like this one bit...nope...not one bit. As if Microsoft's monopoly wasn't bad enough.
Re:Will DeBeers be the new RIAA (Score:4, Interesting)
There are also other companies that have developed processes to grow gem grade and sized diamonds that are in almost every way indisiguishable from a "natural" diamond. These processess in particular are what led DeBeers to start laser coding their diamonds for authenticity. Growing gem grade diamonds scares the jeebies out of DeBeers, and they will either make it illegal, or find some dubious means to crush any attempts at it.
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Closer than some people think. (Score:5, Informative)
If this man and his product really pan out, we could see some eally exciting advances in the semiconductor industry. But there could be a billion dollar enterprise that might think otherewise.
A quote from said artice:
But De Beers wasn't backing down. Throughout 2000, the cartel accelerated its Gem Defensive Programme, sending out its testing machines - dubbed DiamondSure and DiamondView - to the largest international gem labs. Traditionally, these labs analyzed and certified color, clarity, and size. Now they were being asked to distinguish between man-made and mined. The DiamondSure shines light through a stone and analyzes its refractory characteristics. If the gem comes up suspicious, it must be tested with the DiamondView, which uses ultraviolet light to reveal the crystal's internal structure. "Ideally the trade would like to have a simple instrument that could positively identify a diamond as natural or synthetic," De Beers scientists wrote in 1996, when the company unveiled plans to develop authentication devices. "Unfortunately, our research has led us to conclude that it is not feasible at this time to produce such an ideal instrument, inasmuch as synthetic diamonds are still diamonds physically and chemically."
Perspective; a long way to go (Score:5, Informative)
The research teams have been able to fabricate semiconductor gates. In other words, they have probably been able to make a couple lone transistors (on/off electrical amplification switches) on a substrate lying in a lab with very controlled conditions -- long way off from computer processing.
You can run Doom on this about as easily as you can run Quake with your bedroom lightswitch...
Optical Routers (Score:4, Interesting)
This is part of the reason why the fibre optic revolution has been more of a slow turn... fast pipes are great, but it helps if you know where to send them.
81GHz isn't going to solve the problem - but it will help.
Q.
Perfect crystal diamonds are about to get cheap (Score:5, Informative)
Apollo Diamond [apollodiamond.com] is now making near perfect crystal diamonds by vapor deposition. Their product has fewer flaws than natural diamonds. Since the diamond jewelry industry has been making a big deal out of "flawless" diamonds for a century, they're stuck - the industrial process is better than the natural one. Semiconductor process technology has been making near perfect crystals of silicon, quartz, sapphire, ruby, etc. for years, after all. This is just the next step.
Sapphires used to be rare gems. Not anymore. Linde Chemical started making synthetic star sapphires in the 1970s. Then sapphires went into volume production. Then the patents ran out. This [maintechsapphires.com] is where the sapphire industry is now:
A few years, and bulk diamonds will be on the Home Shopping Channel.
Re:Diamond to replace vacuum tubes?? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Diamond to replace vacuum tubes?? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Diamond to replace vacuum tubes?? (Score:5, Informative)
1) High quality audio reproduction. Any home audio freak will tell you nothing sounds like a sweet tube amp. There is both anecdotal and scientific evidence for the superiority of tubes versus semiconductors. Why then do we use semconductors as audio amps? Price and size. For a home theater amp, semi's cost anywhere from $100 to $900+, and tubes cost anywhere from $500 to $20,000.
2) High frequency amplification. Good for rf transmitters. They have many other high frequency uses as well.
Don't discount the tube!
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Re:Diamond to replace vacuum tubes?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, right after they tell you how much better records sound than CDs, and that aliens are stealing their newspaper.
The fact is, people just like the sound of a tube more, because of it's distortion. It doesn't produce a better, cleaner, or clearer sound, it's just a sound some people like more. That sound, in fact, could be reproduced with a good DSP.
Please point me to any "scientific" evidence that tubes are superior.
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Re:Diamond to replace vacuum tubes?? (Score:4, Informative)
Enhancement mode MOS transistors have characteristics very close to those of ideal pentodes, and should therefore give even better results (no transformers.) But that doesn't suit the guys (always guys) with the "golden ears" and the bullshit filter bypass.
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Re:Diamond to replace vacuum tubes?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, since "sounding better" is a subjective judgement, anyone who says so is right. They'd be wrong if they claimed that tube amps were more accurate than transistor amps.
What tubes have going for them is that they don't clip the way that transistors do when their power limit is exceeded. Transistors clip, tubes go non-linear and approach their power limit asymptotically.
Of course, anyone who routinely overdrives their amp like that has probably lost the ability to hear much more than the ringing in their ears.
-jcr
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You, sir, need a drink! (Score:4, Funny)
Sometimes better(x,y) maps to greater(x,y) or less(x,y). So it is entirely possible that for some value of better(), better(tube, silicon) is true. If, for example, I'm a salesdude at a hifi store and you are a customer with stacks of cash. Then *clearly* better(silicon, tube) is true. However, after I sell you the tube amp and I'm spending my commission check on my own amp, better(tube, silicon) is true as long as I'm trying to optimize for a maximal personal bank account.
If I'm trying to create the best listening device for my music, then... it doesn't matter. All my music is in MP3 format which horribly degrades the original signal. A nicely distorting vintage tube amp and a nice martini are probably the ideal combination to help me forget.
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Tubes may not go away for a long time (Score:5, Informative)
There are work arounds for the low power problem. In my job, (US Navy Electronics Technician) I've worked on an LF transmitter that could crank out over 150KW. It was all solid-state. The workaround to not cook silicon? It used about a freaking million amplifier circuit cards. I think it might have been more efficetive to just use 4 PA tubes but whatever.
Now the problem is high frequency and high power together. Consider the semiconductor. Two (slightly) different materials with a depletion region in the center. Well that's basically like a capacitor. Capacitors tend to pass higher frequency signals. If the signal is getting passed, it is not getting amplified. This problem is called inter-electrode capacitance. Tubes suffer from the same downfall. They dont just resemble capacitors, they are capacitors to a degree.
The tube world has to use some pretty crazy devices to amplify signals at high frequencies. These methods cannot transfer to the solid state world. For more information google for "klystron", and "travelling wave tube".
But because the issue of inter-electrode capacitance cannot be easily solved with workarounds. The only way to have a high frequency, high power amp, is with a tube. With higher quality semiconductors, this will no longer be true.
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Re:overclocking (Score:5, Informative)
* CPU's perform a large number of transistor switches in a single clock cycle.
* The rise/fall response time must be much smaller than the switching time.
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Yes. (Score:5, Informative)
DeBeers is shitting a brick over it too, because that means its nearly impossible to tell a diamond from the ground from a lab one, except the lab one is even purer. The good part of this is the tech industry has far more muscle and clout than DeBeers does. DeBeers is truly an evil company sown on the blood of africa and putting them out of business would do the world a favor.
In fact, the only way for this technology to become realistic is for large scale lab diamond growing like I mentioned above. Its still many years off.
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De Beers are scum (Score:5, Interesting)
That inhuman pack of gunship flying, mercenary hiring, indigenous population exploiting *ssholes can suck it down and shut up.
Our obsession over "pretty sparklies" is disgusting, and what we are willing to ignore to ensure a steady flow is reprehensible. How many middle-class housewifes with a rock on a finger know the TRUE cost of that shiny bauble?
Lets wake up to ourselves and try to develop a modicum of common sense? Why are diamonds expensive? Because they are in demand. Why are they in demand - no it is not the industrial applications? Because they are expensive.
Q.
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Re:Mmmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Ummmm... (Score:4, Informative)
As for tube amps in high-power situations, that's still the norm. The reason tubes fell to discrete transistors was mainly due to the fact that tubes have to be heated to work right. While several tube heaters in a small radio mean serious inefficiency, a 200W tube heater coil in a 200 KW radio transmitter means that all of 0.1% of your broadcast power is used for the tube heater - no big deal. Add to that the fact that large transistors are very expensive and the difficulty of moving heat away from the junctions in something that large, and tubes are still the natural choice for really high-power applications.
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Apollo Diamond (Score:4, Informative)
there is a corporation in Boston which is developing ultra-pure diamonds using a vapor disposition techinque
You're thinking of Apollo Diamond [apollodiamond.com], which plans to use revenues from selling vapor deposition gemstones to fund research into diamond semiconductors. There's a nice writeup about synthetic diamonds [everything2.com] at E2.
However, in many markets, synthetic diamonds sold as gemstones have to be labeled as synthetic, giving De Beers an out: "A diamond isn't forever if it was grown in a lab five days ago."
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