Only a few are singing about them yet, but it could turn out that diamonds are a computer’s best friend.
Damon Jackson is one researcher who sees the sparkling gems as a way to overcome the limitations of the silicon chips that serve as the brains of computers and the machines they run.
“It’s not a pie-in-the-sky idea,” said Jackson, who works in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco. “I would not be surprised at all, as more people start to look into this, if five or 10 years down the line that diamond would be a common material in a computer.”
He showed off a microscope focused on a $1,500 natural diamond topped with a spiral of electronic circuits. On a second diamond, eight circuits pointed upward to the summit.
Electronics and the most treasured of jewels may appear an unlikely marriage, but for the shortcomings of today’s chips and new advances in creating diamonds.
A conventional computer chip is a slab of silicon topped with millions of transistors — tiny switches that provide the computing power as electricity passes through them.
That blitz of electricity produces heat, a scourge of chip designers that may halt progress in making faster silicon semiconductors after a decade or so.
Source: Reuters
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