It still amazes me that the rare shiny rocks humanity has appreciated for thousands of years also turn out to have amazing properties even compared to the synthetic materials we are now capable of creating. It's still the hardest material we have measured. It is the best thermal conductor, even though it's an electrical insulator.
I've thought about this at times. How convenient that things seem to work out that way! Though I wonder if it's more just a bias. All the very impressive things you can make from the abundant materials have already been made. Like, say, all of life?
If I'm reading this correctly it's two or threefold. Faster switching times, which both increases max speed and reduces power consumption. Avoids flaws due to silicon doping, presently we add ions to silicon to get P or N type junctions and they've found a way to get P type junctions using "2D Hole Gas" which is basically a thin layer of voids inside the bulk diamond crystal after treatment and avoids a category of flaws that affect silicon yields. Third, and this is speculation, but diamond has a way higher thermal conductivity and lower thermal expansion coefficient, so it can likely withstand higher temps and conduct heat away faster.
I think the better question is: what real world applications need these qualities enough to justify the cost? They mention cooling application, I don't buy that anyone is that interested in reducing hotspots in their chips even if it makes them last longer.
I had a family friend working on diamond semiconductors in the 90s. The application at that time was for sensors located in the hot section of a jet engine.
The higher the voltages it can handle, the faster it can switch efficiently, and the better the thermal performance, the wider its potential applications in power electronics.
Superfluid helium's maximum thermal conductivity is roughly 100x diamond's maximum!
And logical, now that we can produce them easily enough.
This, is one of many uses of the rocks.
I believe the main difficulty is making large and pure diamonds. Making small low purity diamonds is cheap and easy to scale.
just one tiny tiny microscopic question...
why would someone use diamond wafer costing 1000x more than a silicon wafer??!
:)
>> 50x faster switching
It's hard to say which applications will benefit the most, but orders of magnitude improvement tend to enable qualitative shifts downstream.
Not to mention, 1000x is just the cost right now while the tech is new.
Very low power chips might be the main application, as there is already a huge market (laptops and phones).
Or maybe there will be a whole set of new rf chips, profiting from the clock speed.