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08 Apr 2010 11:01 | by Asavin Wattanajantra | posted in Chips
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It could happen that the microchips of tomorrow could be made out of diamond rather than silicon.
According to the ¦
 Ô pure diamond is an electrical insulatorÔ but given the right impurities is
has the capability of being a semiconductor - and diamonds are the best thermal conductors on earth.
What this means is that synthetic diamonds could be used to create microchips which handle high-powerÔ
but do not need ³power-hungry cooling systems´.
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³Diamond-based control modules in electric cars and industrial machinery could lead to considerable
energy savingsÔ´ said Japanese scientist Hideaki YamadaÔ from the Institute of Advanced Industrial
Science and Technology.
The problem so far though has been making diamond wafers big enough to carve thousands of
microchips and make it economically viable.
Synthetic diamonds are made using chemical vapour deposition (CVD) where plasma of methane or
another hydrocarbon gas deposits carbon on a surface which is seeded with diamond particles.
The wafer is grown and etched off the seed layerÔ but so far the largest diamond wafers have been too
small. This changed when scientists tried to use CVD to bond a series of identical small wafers togetherÔ
and managed to make 25mm square wafers.
"It certainly has sufficient potential for fabricating electronic devicesÔ" says YamadaÔ saying that the
method could make bigger wafers.
In the next year his group is aiming to produce 50-by-50 millimetre and 75-by-75 millimetre wafers.

Read more: http://www.techeye.net/chips/diamond-chips-could-replace-silicon#ixzz0zr9OZB5mp