December 20th , 2004
Adam Tanner
Reuters News Agency

LIVERMORE CALIF. - Diamonds can overcome the limitations the silicon chips that serve as the brains of computers and the machines they run, said one researcher.

“It’s not a pie-in-the-sky idea” said Damon 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.

The blitz of electricity produces heat, a scourge of chip designers that may halt progress in making faster silicon semiconductors after a decade or so. Enter the diamond, which already has a major presence in manufacturing because of its strength and extremely high melting point.

“You can operate a diamond-based transistor at higher temperatures than you could a silicon based transistor,” said John Venables, an advisor at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Venables was already predicting diamond computer chips in 1990, when he headed a National Academy of Sciences study. Skeptics say the failure of such expectations to materialize points to the significant obstacles in making diamond chips.

“It’s not on the mainstream radar screen,” said Pushkar Apte, vice president of technology programs at Semiconductor Industry Association in San Jose, California.

Even now, Venables does not expect home computers to carry stickers saying “diamond inside” any time soon. Instead, he sees diamond chips in specialized devices like satellites, which have difficulty disposing of heat in space.

The price of such chips remains potentially daunting, but scientists hope new techniques in man-made diamonds will lower costs. “The initial cost is huge,” Jackson said at Livermore. “Once it works, your cost per unit drops.”

Serious work on manufactured diamonds dates back half a century but scientists have seen growing success in recent years. Several private companies are already marketing the man-made gems.