De Beers's Nightmare

[Johnny Pneumatic]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html]Here ( [url) ya go.[/URL]

[Wolverine]

There's a duplicate http:// in your url. ;)

[geni]

So they are letting a journaist wounder around with their test dimonds?

Then there is that stament about inverting borons natual conductivity. That makes no snese. Boron makes silicon electron difficent because it only carries 3 electrons. You can't dump 5 onto it.

[Beanbag]

Funny to hear how DeBeers is taking the news. Hopefully, they've seen the writing on the wall and have diversified into something else. Think of it like Reagan's Star Wars proposal. It's technologically feasable; all you have to do is throw enough money at the problem to make it work.

It was fortunate that the Soviet Union fell and made their marvellous engineers and scientists available for the regular market-driven world. I watched the Nova program on synthetic diamonds a few years back and was struck by a couple of things with the Russian technology. First off, they were remarkably adept at making things work with less than state-of-the-art equipment. Second off, the diamond-growing equipment they were exporting to the US at that time for Clarke's operation was remarkably refined, well-designed, and self contained. They LOOKED like a reliable piece of apparatus, not something cobbled together in a garage lab. They'd obviously made the transition from prototype to something capable of sustained production. Obviously, from the Wired article, improvements could be made with the process control and monitoring, with relatively cheap digital controllers being available here.

Of course, DeBeers is banking on emotion to rule out the cold logic of dollars. I can relate to that, working in a field that should have gone the way of the dinosaur. No one NEEDS an $80,000 dollar watch, especially when you can buy a watch for less than $20 that works as well (or better) than the most sophisticated mechanical chronometer. However, there are a LOT of people out there that WANT such an item, and are willing to pay to own a fine mechanical watch. Fortunately for me, such watches require regular servicing, and there aren't too many watchmakers out there that can successfully work on such watches. Keeps me employed, even though I sometimes have problems dealing with the concept of conspicuous consumption. I've held a half-million dollar watch and sadly thought about the positive impact that money could have on a large number of people.

Then I set about the process of getting it repaired. Kinda like the Federal Reserve workers. After a while, it ceases to be money, and just becomes bundles of paper that have to be accounted for very scrupulously.

Regards;
Beanbag

[Anathema]

Here is the unpooched URL (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html)

[neutrino_cannon]

I was impressed by the level of paranoia in the article. I had of course heard rumors that Debeers had connections to mercenary groups like Executive Outcomes, and that they are thugs generally, but I had never known if there was any substance beind those rumors.

[geni]

Originally posted by neutrino_cannon
I was impressed by the level of paranoia in the article. I had of course heard rumors that Debeers had connections to mercenary groups like Executive Outcomes, and that they are thugs generally, but I had never known if there was any substance beind those rumors.

Quite posibley but if you operated on a large scale in some less than stable countries you would have links to organisations like that as well.

[Drooper]

Originally posted by geni
Quite posibley but if you operated on a large scale in some less than stable countries you would have links to organisations like that as well.

If you operated the world's largest protection racket you mean.

[Drooper]

This is interesting, but not the end of the story by a long shot.

De Beers haven't got where they are without knowing and using every trick in the book. If they can take a relatively common carbon crystal, annex virtually the total global supply, convince people that is is somehow rare and valuable. If they can prevent any second market by both legal and dubious commercial means and by convincing people that you just don't sell diamonds. If they can use various means to prevent the develpoment of any grey market in the stones. Then they will try a few things to head off this threat as well.

My predictions.


"they are not "pure" diamonds. Look at them, they are yellow, when everyone knows diamonds are pure and clear. This is what de Beers did to Kimberly - coloured diamonds!!??!! obviously they are not of the same quality.

Expect a new advertising campaign driving home the importance of having clear "flawless" diamonds.

Manufacturers will find it difficult to get skilled jewellers to cut and polish these diamonds. As the article says, most large or high quality diamonds go throug Antwerp. The small low grade stuff goes to India. Jewellers in Antwerp get a strictly controlled allocation of diamonds from De Beers and to be shut out of that club, or to be given the worst diamonds would cost you a lot of money that you couldn't replace using these yellow diamonds.

[Iconoclast]

Originally posted by Drooper
"they are not "pure" diamonds. Look at them, they are yellow, when everyone knows diamonds are pure and clear. This is what de Beers did to Kimberly - coloured diamonds!!??!! obviously they are not of the same quality.

Expect a new advertising campaign driving home the importance of having clear "flawless" diamonds.
You stopped reading too soon:

From the Wired article
There was one last decision to make. Each machine was capable of generating a 3-carat yellow stone every three days (colorless takes longer). Given their scarcity, the price per carat was much higher for yellow diamonds - so much higher, in fact, that only the very wealthy could afford them. Plus, colored diamonds have gotten hot in recent years. (J. Lo's engagement ring? Pink diamond.) Clarke decided that he'd make the biggest splash by bringing yellows to Middle America.

[Drooper]

Originally posted by Iconoclast
You stopped reading too soon:

Sounds to me like they will be welcomed into the de Beers club. Talks are probably progressing as we type. In fact, they have probably reached an agreement already.


As a related story. I remeber some bloke (I think he was an ex commodities trader) came up with an idea of making some standardised diamonds that could be traded in a secondary market. He thought the could be graded and certified in some way and then sealed in some sort of resin.

Suffice to say, that idea didn't fly. :)

[DangerousBeliefs]

Diamonds will soon be like sapphires...

PICK YOUR SIZE AND COLOR - TODAY ONLY - $39.99
(Mounting fee is $59.99 - Ring not included)

[TriangleMan]

Personally I hope this takes off and the price of diamonds collapse. I've always been annoyed by the price of gemstones, mostly because De Beers had kept the price artifically high for decades. Although they've lost ground in recent years De Beers used to have almost a total monopoly on diamonds and I hope these synthetic diamonds cause De Beers to spiral into ruin.

Speaking of De Beers rumours, I've heard that some execs are still under some kind of supeona or court action in the US so they refuse to ever travel there so they won't have to answer to the US courts. I'll see if I can find anything on that.

(edited to add: Yep (http://www.professionaljeweler.com/archives/news/2004/102904story.html) looks like its true).

[Yaotl]

Originally posted by Drooper
Sounds to me like they will be welcomed into the de Beers club. Talks are probably progressing as we type. In fact, they have probably reached an agreement already.


The article was written a year ago. Both companies are still around and operating by themselves.

I could care less whether they're able to make and pass off synthetic gemstones for the jewelry market. If they ever get the costs down enough to be used for chip manufacture, I'd be tripping over myself trying to get a computer that pushed the limits of diamond's heat tolerance.

[Drooper]

Originally posted by Yaotl
The article was written a year ago. Both companies are still around and operating by themselves.

I could care less whether they're able to make and pass off synthetic gemstones for the jewelry market. If they ever get the costs down enough to be used for chip manufacture, I'd be tripping over myself trying to get a computer that pushed the limits of diamond's heat tolerance.

I am sure they are operating indpeendently, just wth a mutual understanding about what is best for all parties.

[neutrino_cannon]

Don't diamonds ignite before they melt?

[Soapy Sam]

I'm curious how noisy a fan will have to be to cool a diamond based processor? And what kind of fire insurance will I need?
Nitrogen filled case?

Oh- synthetic gem quality diamonds, great.

Who cares?

[epepke]

What's the big bruhaha here? There have been cheap, synthetic, industrial diamonds for decades now. Where do you think all that diamond jewelry from Service Merchandise came from?

[Yaotl]

Originally posted by Drooper
I am sure they are operating indpeendently, just wth a mutual understanding about what is best for all parties.

That Gemsis and Apollo can undercut DeBeers in every way? DeBeers is the only one to have anything to lose.

[Yaotl]

Originally posted by epepke
What's the big bruhaha here? There have been cheap, synthetic, industrial diamonds for decades now. Where do you think all that diamond jewelry from Service Merchandise came from?

I think it's the size and quality of the gems now.

[Iconoclast]

Originally posted by epepke
What's the big bruhaha here? There have been cheap, synthetic, industrial diamonds for decades now. Where do you think all that diamond jewelry from Service Merchandise came from? The big "bruhaha" is that up until a few years ago we weren't able to grow large single crystal diamonds.

[Ziggurat]

Originally posted by Soapy Sam
I'm curious how noisy a fan will have to be to cool a diamond based processor? And what kind of fire insurance will I need?
Nitrogen filled case?

I don't see diamond chips happening any time soon. And a big reason is that silicon manufacturing technology is very mature, and still rapidly advancing. There's a lot of money being spent optimizing silicon technology, and there's simply no economic way to get to even a fraction of that funding with a new, unproven technology. And any time you start out with something totally different like this, the number of problems you need to solve is enormous, problems that silicon technology has already spent decades overcoming. No one is going to risk spending the money, and time, necessary to develop an uncertain technology to compete against a moving target like silicon. So nothing is going to replace silicon until the exponential increase in silicon technology starts to level off. The only hope for diamond chips in the near future is the possibility of niche applications, where it isn't performance or cost, but something completely different (like, say, heat tolerance) that lets it be used for applications that silicon can't do at all. But even then, don't count on it, because the money available for such a development isn't going to be very large.

[Yaotl]

Originally posted by Ziggurat
I don't see diamond chips happening any time soon. And a big reason is that silicon manufacturing technology is very mature, and still rapidly advancing. There's a lot of money being spent optimizing silicon technology, and there's simply no economic way to get to even a fraction of that funding with a new, unproven technology. And any time you start out with something totally different like this, the number of problems you need to solve is enormous, problems that silicon technology has already spent decades overcoming. No one is going to risk spending the money, and time, necessary to develop an uncertain technology to compete against a moving target like silicon. So nothing is going to replace silicon until the exponential increase in silicon technology starts to level off. The only hope for diamond chips in the near future is the possibility of niche applications, where it isn't performance or cost, but something completely different (like, say, heat tolerance) that lets it be used for applications that silicon can't do at all. But even then, don't count on it, because the money available for such a development isn't going to be very large.

But wouldn't it be a trade off between the cost of coming up with new tech to create <90nm processors and the like and beginning anew with a material that doesn't need to be that small to be usable?

[phildonnia]

"It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week." So goes the De Beers-backed line.

I guess they decided against:

"It's not a symbol of eternal love unless it helped finance a bloody civil war in West Africa"


For those of us who get the dead-tree version of Wired, there was a cover with this naked babe covered with diamonds. And the funny thing was, she appeared to be one of those computer-generated images; creating a more thorough "synthetic" motif.

[TillEulenspiegel]

A few posters have noted the application in chips by this created diamond as an active element. That isn't really the case per se.

Modern Mil-Spec LSI chips use a Sapphire substrate as a foundation to deposit layers of conductors to formulate chips used in warheads, satellites and other high stress environments. I'm not quite sure how the constraints work , but in consumer electronics the intrinsic silicone substrate is used to create a Quantum "potential wells"which is utilized as an active part of the chip.

Sapphire is a bit more dense but diamond is stronger I'm not sure of the considerations of a trade off between the two since the info is not readily available, interesting tho. I'll have to track down some hard factual data to understand the case fully.

[Yaotl]

Originally posted by TillEulenspiegel
A few posters have noted the application in chips by this created diamond as an active element. That isn't really the case per se.

Modern Mil-Spec LSI chips use a Sapphire substrate as a foundation to deposit layers of conductors to formulate chips used in warheads, satellites and other high stress environments. I'm not quite sure how the constraints work , but in consumer electronics the intrinsic silicone substrate is used to create a Quantum "potential wells"which is utilized as an active part of the chip.

Sapphire is a bit more dense but diamond is stronger I'm not sure of the considerations of a trade off between the two since the info is not readily available, interesting tho. I'll have to track down some hard factual data to understand the case fully.

It would replace silicon, wouldn't it? And there are already a few places that are making the attempt. Newer article (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6315319/site/newsweek/) that gives a name or two.

[TillEulenspiegel]

I'm not sure Yaotl. As I stated most of the design characteristics are not published, but as Ziggurat mentioned there is an economy of scale. Who could be a more perfect consumer and driver of research then the DOD ?

The mention of Intel gives the study credence. There are questions I have which are not answerable by news releases.
The main one being the process of "doping" of silicon. The whole enterprise of semi-conductors is based on a potential difference between two similar materials. It's long and pedantic, bottom line being , I'm not sure how you could accomplish this in our diamond scenario. The questions are for material scientists.

I will poke around tho.

[Yaotl]

Originally posted by TillEulenspiegel
I'm not sure Yaotl. As I stated most of the design characteristics are not published, but as Ziggurat mentioned there is an economy of scale. Who could be a more perfect consumer and driver of research then the DOD ?

The mention of Intel gives the study credence. There are questions I have which are not answerable by news releases.
The main one being the process of "doping" of silicon. The whole enterprise of semi-conductors is based on a potential difference between two similar materials. It's long and pedantic, bottom line being , I'm not sure how you could accomplish this in our diamond scenario. The questions are for material scientists.

I will poke around tho.

The Wired article has something about the potential difference I think. Something about boron or other. It's beyond my ken.

[Beanbag]

The usual dopants for silicon are boron for a positive charge, and phosphorus for negative. I spent a few years as a semiconductor diffusion process tech.

Regards;
Beanbag