The microchips that power everything from supercomputers to smart phones are made of the same material – silicon. But a Vanderbilt professor says diamonds may turn out to be a processor’s best friend.
WPLN’s Daniel Potter spoke with electrical engineer Jim Davidson, who figures using manmade diamonds could make more powerful and more efficient microchips.
Listen now:
“Davidson standing behind a chemical vapor deposition machine used to create nanodiamond transistors.’ (Daniel Dubois – courtesy Vanderbilt University)
Hello Dan.
Howdy Blake.
So first of all, Dan – manmade diamonds? I think we’ve heard of these – cubic zirconia, right?
Yeah, the first thing that springs to mind is a fake engagement ring, right? But Professor Davidson is talking about actual diamond; cubic zirconia is chemically different. Diamonds take a good billion years to form naturally, but it turns out you can skip the long wait by using plasma to heat methane gas – which is partly carbon, the main ingredient of diamonds. Here’s Professor Davidson; he says the diamond is manmade, but that doesn’t mean fake:
“I don’t want to dilute the idea that this is somehow not diamond. If you take a great deal of care with how you grow the diamond – and there are two companies right now making a market in jewelry diamond by this same type of process: you have to grow it slower and things like that but you can make a nearly perfect diamond, much better than naturally occurring diamond, if you use this type process.”
But Davidson’s not making diamonds for jewelry in his Vanderbilt lab, so what exactly is he making?
He’s making thin sheets you can shape as the tiny pieces of microchips. The thought here is basically everything silicon does in your home electronics, diamond can do better. Davidson figures you can make diamond semiconductors that get around a lot of the limits silicon is brushing up against right now – a big one being extreme temperatures.
“I mean we’ve operated the devices at 500 degrees centigrade. We’ve put the devices through radiation bombardments that would literally annihilate the silicon-type devices and they operate as if they’d never gone through it.”
Davidson figures that resistance to heat and radiation makes for applications in places like outer space, and the cores of nuclear power plants. Incidentally right now a lot of his money for research comes from the military.
OK. I can see why it would be nice to have computers that can work inside a nuclear reactor, but what about all of our smart phones. Do diamond processors – could they help consumers like you and me?
‘This scanning electron microscope close-up shows how the components of a nanodiamond device are cantilevered above a surface of the electrical insulator silicon dioxide.’ (Davidson Lab – courtesy Vanderbilt)
Well, you know how electronics keep getting smaller and faster and cheaper? Some industry folks worry the rapid progress of the last few decades could hit a wall. If silicon electronics are pushed much further they’re going to have problems with overheating. Davidson and I talked a little bit about why.
“The reason your laptop gets hot in your lap is because they’ve been designed to go as fast as they possibly can. Fast in solid-state electronics – in the microprocessor, in the Pentium chip, translates to trying to push more electrons harder through the solid material of silicon.”
In other words, it’s kind of the same way the coils in a toaster turn red hot. But remember what I said about how temperature isn’t a problem for diamond chips? Ding! Problem solved. And also, all that heat silicon-based devices put out is wasted energy, so the thought is diamond would be more efficient, too.
I assume anything with diamonds must be extremely expensive as well. How long till these things are cheap enough that we’re all sporting diamond cellphones, so to speak?
Well, despite everything we assume about diamond, Professor Davidson says the supplies and the machinery here are relatively affordable – it’s mostly a question of finding money to bring it to scale.
Well thank you for bringing us the story, Dan.
You’re welcome, Blake.
That’s WPLN reporter Daniel Potter. I’m Blake Farmer.
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