Diamond Chips

• MAY 2001
• BY TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

Scientists have developed a crystalline diamond film that could

produce more resilient semiconductor chips than those made from
silicon.
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Silicon Valley may soon have to change its name. A team of scientists led by
Matthias Schreck of the University of Augsburg in Germany has developed a
crystalline diamond film that could produce more resilient semiconductor chips
than those made from silicon. Until now, synthetic diamonds have proved a poor
semiconducting material. Their microscopic crystals are a disorderly hodgepodge,
and their edges are not evenly aligned, impeding the flow of current. Now, Schreck
and his colleagues have discovered that by growing the diamond film on a surface
of iridium, instead of on silicon, they can keep its grain boundaries aligned. Adding
atoms of boron or nitrogen enables the diamond film to conduct electricity.
Manufacturers plan to build a diamond chip that can withstand temperatures of
500 C, compared to only about 150 C for silicon chips. The chips would be most
useful in devices located near hot-burning engines, such as those used in
automobiles or airplanes.

Silicon chips have reached the limit of their capacity to act as a semi-conductor of
electricity. "Silicon Chips" according to MIT Professor of material science, Dr. Wuensch
states" Will melt into a puddle" at this rate and diamond is the solution to that problem. A
modern computer system in the office will generate heat at [100] degrees celsius, enough
to heat a small office on a cold day.

This has prompted scientist to discover a replacement material that can handle more
electricity with greater conductivity without over heating. This quest set off a world-wide
race to take control of the computer and synthetic diamond industry.

The initial players in this quest are De Beers who controls the most productive and
valuable diamond mines on earth located in Botswana S. Africa. And Apollo Diamond
who produce synthetic laboratory created diamonds in United States

Apollo is owned by a first rate scientist whose dream was to create a better computer
power chip..He knew that the ultimate conductor is the diamond itself. Diamond can
conduct more electricity without over heating than any material on earth.. He also knew
that even the world's best De Beer mine diamonds do not have consistent properties that
you can depend on to make computer chips.
Synthetic laboratory created diamonds held the key. A new technology was created called
"Chemical Vapor Deposition." This Apollo advanced [CVD] application grew diamond
crystals of highest purity without metallic inclusions. These new "Hybrid Synthetic" lab
created diamonds were uncovered and reported to De Beers "Diamond Trading
Company."

This set off a series of events that compelled the De Beers group to start scientific
research of their own. It was a two-fold attack on the [CVD] chemical vapor deposition
industry. One was to develop diamond scanning equipment to detect a synthetic diamond
entering the market place. De Beers being most resourceful did just that. He launched a
"Gem Defensive Program" and developed two state of the art diamond testing machines
called, "Diamond Sure and Diamond View."

Events are unfolding and America's largest diamond testing facility, the "Gemological
Institute of America has become aware of the Apollo Diamond as a possible threat to the
entire natural diamond industry. We should take pause at the magnitude of the economic
power sectors at play. We are talking about "Multi-Billion" dollars industries that effect
change on a global level.

The [GIA] used their lab diamond testing "Spectroscope," which was state of the art at
the time. The began testing the new synthetic stones, one by one. And after each test they
discovered the Apollo synthetic lab created diamonds had no visible color spectra or
absorption. It passed the natural diamond test! But testing was not over yet. The DeBeers
"Gem Defense Program" had applied and was given permission by the [GIA] to also test
the new synthetic diamonds with their next generation of "Diamond View and Diamond
Sure" testing equipment.

These instruments use a new diamond testing technology called "Fourier-Transform

Infrared Spectroscopy" [FTIR]. A system that can detect hydrogen related centers that
have never be observed in natural diamonds. De Beers did detect [6200-6400] centimeter
of hydrogen which is used to make Apollo synthetic lab created diamonds. De Beers was
successful at detecting synthetic lab created diamonds. The diamond industry felt relief
that the market price would remain stable.

But this was a meaningless exercise. Apollo was only interested in selling gem quality
diamonds to fund his diamond computer chip program. His goal from the beginning was
to create a " Better Computer Chip." They spent a decade trying to find the "Sweet Spot"
where he can duplicate his scientific chemical vapor deposition experiment and
reproduce an exact synthetic lab created diamond. After countless years of trial and error,
Apollo Diamond pain stakingly persevered and finally found the "Sweet Spot" and was
awarded a patent for his efforts.

De Beers was also a very creative and industrious individual. Being a man of action and
with inexhaustible wealth, set out to develop his own synthetic diamond. He also new the
diamond testing machines were only his first plan of attack. His second was in motion.
He purchased his own "World Class" laboratory to create synthetic diamonds for
computer chips. His facility was named " Element Six."

De Beers a privately held company called "Diamond Trading Company" has a very large
agenda. He currently owns the largest single stock pile of high end diamonds on earth. He
has accumulated this treasure over his [100] year mining history in Africa. His power
allows him to manipulate world price on high end diamonds through Antwerp Belgium.
His next goal is to create the first "Diamond Computer Chip" and control the world
market and computer industry. If ever a man exist who could do this it would be
DeBeers.

The rest of the world is now waking up to the colossal economic stakes. Now Europe and
Japan have begun scientific endeavor toward the quest of creating the first synthetic lab
created diamond computer chip. But Intel, the largest silicon chip producer in the United
States is apparently indifferent to it all. The comment by Soumyanath, Intel's director of
communication circuits research,"It takes about ten years to evaluate a new material, we
have a lot invested in silicon and we're not about to abandon that." Unless Intel has
revised it's position, the torch is in the hands of Apollo Diamond and DeBeers Element
Six synthetic laboratories.

Apollo wasn't asleep at the wheel while all of this was going on. He continued his
research after being granted a patent. His next scientific break-through was in
collaboraton with French and Israel scientist. They together discovered how to produce a
[CVD] snythetic lab created diamond with a positive and negative charge. The process
was called "Boron-Doped N Type." Apollo injected boron mineral with a [P-N] positive
and negative charge, into the diamond crystal lattice. Resulting in the first diamond on
earth with the capacity to hold a charge and conduct electricity without over heating. The
race is on.

MediaRoom Free Public Education Series

One of the more intriguing prospects in the semiconductor world is diamond. Diamond
has many properties that are superior to silicon. Diamond has a higher bandgap than
silicon, can tolerate higher temperatures, and has the potential to form transistors that
switch faster than silicon. Ralph Merkle notes that:

“Diamond excels in its electronic properties. Fundamentally, it lets us move charge

around much faster before things stop working. [snip] … diamond transistors can
operate at much higher temperatures because diamond has a larger “bandgap” than
other materials (particularly silicon) … [snip] … Because diamond has a wider
bandgap, it shorts out at a proportionally higher temperature than silicon.

Diamond also has greater thermal conductivity, which lets us move heat out of a
diamond transistor more quickly to prevent it from getting too hot.
… [snip]
Finally, electrons (and holes) move with different speeds through different materials,
even when the electric field is the same. Again, electrons and holes in diamond move
faster than in silicon.

Because diamond transistors can be hotter, are more easily cooled, can tolerate higher
voltages before breaking down, and electrons move more easily in them; they make
better transistors than other materials. Diamond would be ideal for electronic devices if
only we could manufacture it inexpensively and with precisely the desired structure.

Merkle's arguments are supported by the fact that the

Japanese Government wants to create diamond-based
microchips. The government-industry venture will
endeavor to create power electronics and flat-panel
displays using diamond transistors. If this project is to
succeed, the researchers will need to find a way to
inexpensively mass-produce diamond wafers, and also
discover a means to effectively dope diamond substrates.

New computer chip technology

could fill production gap

C In the addressable field

omputer chips are the raw material of the Cyber Age. emitter array concept,
electron beams from
As computer developers come up with machines that
process more and more data faster and faster, they push amorphous diamond
the chip manufacturers closer to the limits of their cathodes "write" circuit
production technologies. patterns onto a computer
chip wafer. The
Researchers at ORNL are developing a method of packing technology could help chip
more circuitry into a smaller space on these silicon wafers. makers attain the degrees
Referred to as 100-nanometer lithography, the term of chip density that
reflects the feature resolution required to pack extremely designers are approaching.
tiny circuits directly onto the microchip wafers. Recent
improvements in optical lithography, however, have pushed the requirements for next-
generation lithography closer to 70- or 50-nanometer feature size.

The ORNL method may be the technology leap the industry requires for that kind of
resolution. Because it uses electron beams to "write" the circuits onto the chips, next-
generation lithography is about as fundamentally different from current processes as
digital is from analog technology.

"Chip density—transistors per square centimeter—doubles about every two years," says
Tommy Thomas, the Instrumentation and Controls Division researcher who is leading the
electron-beam lithography project. "The speed of microprocessors doubles about every
18 months. The technology for manufacturing chips to handle that kind of development is
becoming strained."

Thomas explains that, to make a chip wafer, manufacturers currently make a chrome-on-
glass mask that is four times the size of the chip they want. Lasers are used to illuminate
the mask, and the circuit pattern is focused on a photoresist-covered wafer. When light
hits it, it releases an electron, and the image is then etched into a circuit.

"The idea comes from photolithography, but as you miniaturize and stack layers, it
becomes very complicated," Thomas says. "When you get to a certain point, the lasers
can't be focused any smaller."

Thomas and a host of Lab researchers began to ponder new chip-making technologies
after David Rasmussen of the Fusion Energy Division, who was on assignment to the
SEMATECH consortium, suggested looking into 100-nanometer lithography.

The current state of the art is 200 nanometers. Incidentally, a nanometer is one billionth
of a meter.

"We initially considered electron holography, but Edgar Voelkl in the Metals and
Ceramics Division suggested simply focusing electrons," Thomas says. "We came up
with the idea of programming millions of computer-controlled nano-scale cathodes to
emit electrons and using a magnetic lens to focus the electron beams onto a silicon wafer.
Each beam spot would fill about 20 to 40 nanometers."

The key to the technology is the amorphous diamond emitter, which is what Thomas calls
an electromagnetic cathode coated with amorphous diamond. Amorphous diamond lacks
hydrogen, which makes it harder. Multitudes of amorphous diamond emitters would be
placed on a chip in what Thomas refers to as the addressable field emitter array, or
AFEA. With a successful AFEA process, Thomas says the chip manufacturers could
realize incredible yields of chip density.

"The cathodes emit electrons, similar to the way a digital television screen works,"
Thomas says. "You could fire six million or so programmed emissions at once at a chip.
You would need no mask; you would be coding the surface directly with the electrons.

"That's why we say it's like going from an analog to digital technology. In less than one
second, you could write a square centimeter with 100-nanometer features. A chip wafer
would have 300 one-centimeter squares on it."

Thomas and his colleagues proposed the project three years ago and received DARPA
funds to build a prototype, which has resulted in two wafers of 5 × 5-pixel cathode chips.

Larry Baylor of Fusion Energy Division has been measuring current emissions of the
AFEAs ("You want current, not voltage, because it's more uniform," Thomas says). The
Solid State Division's Doug Lowndes has experimented in making the amorphous
diamond by using laser ablation. Thomas counts six ORNL divisions involved in the
project—I&C, Fusion Energy, M&C, Solid State, Engineering Technology and
Computational Physics and Engineering.

Thomas says the critical issues in the continuing work are whether they can make the
amorphous diamond emitters reliable, uniform, stable, controllable and reproducible. "In
other words, can we make them do what we need for them to do."

If they can, the limits to the data acrobatics currently performed with microchips will be
pushed way beyond what seemed possible just a few years ago

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals. It

is made of a solid piece of semiconductor material, with at least three terminals for
connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the
transistor's terminals changes the current flowing through another pair of terminals.
Because the controlled (output) power can be much more than the controlling (input)
power, the transistor provides amplification of a signal. Today, some transistors are
packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits.

The transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices, and is
ubiquitous in modern electronic systems. Following its release in the early 1950s the
transistor revolutionised the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and
cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, amongst other things.

The transistor is the key active component in practically all modern electronics, and is
considered by many to be one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century.[9] Its
importance in today's society rests on its ability to be mass produced using a highly
automated process (semiconductor device fabrication) that achieves astonishingly low
per-transistor costs.

Although several companies each produce over a billion individually packaged (known
as discrete) transistors every year,[10] the vast majority of transistors now produced are in
integrated circuits (often shortened to IC, microchips or simply chips), along with diodes,
resistors, capacitors and other electronic components, to produce complete electronic
circuits. A logic gate consists of up to about twenty transistors whereas an advanced
microprocessor, as of 2009, can use as many as 2.3 billion transistors (MOSFETs).[11]
"About 60 million transistors were built this year [2002] ... for [each] man, woman, and
child on Earth."[12]

The transistor's low cost, flexibility, and reliability have made it a ubiquitous device.
Transistorized mechatronic circuits have replaced electromechanical devices in
controlling appliances and machinery. It is often easier and cheaper to use a standard
microcontroller and write a computer program to carry out a control function than to
design an equivalent mechanical control function.
[edit] Usage

The bipolar junction transistor, or BJT, was the most commonly used transistor in the
1960s and 70s. Even after MOSFETs became widely available, the BJT remained the
transistor of choice for many analog circuits such as simple amplifiers because of their
greater linearity and ease of manufacture. Desirable properties of MOSFETs, such as
their utility in low-power devices, usually in the CMOS configuration, allowed them to
capture nearly all market share for digital circuits; more recently MOSFETs have
captured most analog and power applications as well, including modern clocked analog
circuits, voltage regulators, amplifiers, power transmitters, motor drivers, etc

Prior to the development of transistors, vacuum (electron) tubes (or in the UK

"thermionic valves" or just "valves") were the main active components in electronic
equipment.

[edit] Advantages

The key advantages that have allowed transistors to replace their vacuum tube
predecessors in most applications are

• Small size and minimal weight, allowing the development of miniaturized

electronic devices.
• Highly automated manufacturing processes, resulting in low per-unit cost.
• Lower possible operating voltages, making transistors suitable for small, battery-
powered applications.
• No warm-up period for cathode heaters required after power application.
• Lower power dissipation and generally greater energy efficiency.
• Higher reliability and greater physical ruggedness.
• Extremely long life. Some transistorized devices have been in service for more
than 50 years.
• Complementary devices available, facilitating the design of complementary-
symmetry circuits, something not possible with vacuum tubes.
• Insensitivity to mechanical shock and vibration, thus avoiding the problem of
microphonics in audio applications.

[edit] Limitations

• Silicon transistors do not operate at voltages higher than about 1,000 volts (SiC
devices can be operated as high as 3,000 volts). In contrast, electron tubes have
been developed that can be operated at tens of thousands of volts.
• High power, high frequency operation, such as that used in over-the-air television
broadcasting, is better achieved in electron tubes due to improved electron
mobility in a vacuum.
• Silicon transistors are much more vulnerable than electron tubes to an
electromagnetic pulse generated by a high-altitude nuclear explosion.
[edit] Types

PNP P-channel

N-
NPN
channel

BJT JFET

BJT and JFET symbols

P-channel

N-
channel

JFET MOSFET enh MOSFET dep

JFET and IGFET symbols

Transistors are categorized by

• Semiconductor material: germanium, silicon, gallium arsenide, silicon carbide,

etc.
• Structure: BJT, JFET, IGFET (MOSFET), IGBT, "other types"
• Polarity: NPN, PNP (BJTs); N-channel, P-channel (FETs)
• Maximum power rating: low, medium, high
• Maximum operating frequency: low, medium, high, radio frequency (RF),
microwave (The maximum effective frequency of a transistor is denoted by the
term fT, an abbreviation for "frequency of transition". The frequency of transition
is the frequency at which the transistor yields unity gain).
• Application: switch, general purpose, audio, high voltage, super-beta, matched
pair
• Physical packaging: through hole metal, through hole plastic, surface mount, ball
grid array, power modules
• Amplification factor hfe (transistor beta)[14]

Thus, a particular transistor may be described as silicon, surface mount, BJT, NPN, low
power,
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