Diamonds – a Geek’s Best Friend? - Ice in Boston
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Meanwhile, more than a thousand miles north in a secret location, Robert Linares runs a company that uses a completely different technique for creating diamonds. Called chemical vapor deposition, this method actually calls for low pressure. Like Gemesis, Linares uses tiny “seed” gems to get the process started. Workers place them on a pedestal in a chamber. The chamber is then depressurized to one-tenth of an atmosphere. The chamber then receives an injection of hydrogen and natural gas, which is heated with a microwave beam to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
At this temperature, the electrons in the gases separate from their nuclei, forming a plasma. Natural gas contains carbon; at this point, the carbon is freed, precipitates out of the plasma, and lands on the tiny seed diamonds. The diamond growing process begins, creating colorless stones at the rate of a half millimeter a day.
Like Clarke’s “diamond mine,” it is not as simple as it sounds. Chemical vapor deposition has been around for decades. The problem is, nobody had figured out how to use it to grow a single crystal. This is where Robert Linares entered the picture. In the 1980s, he was a researcher in advanced semiconductor materials. He sold a company that commercialized the use of gallium arsenide wafers, and plowed the money from that sale into diamond research. “I knew diamonds were going to be the ultimate semiconductor at some point, but everybody thought it was impossible at the time,” Linares noted in an interview with Wired News. “I had the freedom to do what I wanted after I sold my company, so I spent almost 15 years researching on my own.”
Growing single crystal diamond using chemical vapor deposition requires a very specific combination of temperature, gas composition, and pressure, something that no one had ever discovered before. Possible combinations number in the millions. Robert Linares found the right combination in 1996, and received a patent for it in June of 2003.
If CVD diamond can be affordably grown in large wafers, it has huge potential for the computer industry. Intel uses 300 mm wafers. By 2003, Linares’ company, Apollo Diamond, had achieved 90 mm wafers. Even so, Intel should be very interested in this material. Some experimental diamond transistors have been clocked at 81GHz. Experimental silicon wafers can’t even dream of getting anywhere near that speed.
Apollo’s diamonds are particularly pure. Jef Van Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council, the official representative of the diamond industry in Belgium, has examined two of the company’s diamonds. In fact, he stayed up late one night, trying to distinguish them from mined diamonds. The big difference he found was “It’s too perfect to be natural. Things in nature, they have flaws. The growth structure of this diamond is flawless,” he stated in an interview for Wired News. Such flawlessness is exactly what is needed in diamonds aimed at the electronics industry.
Next: Computers With Bling? >>
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