Nice, but don't believe everything that you read. Bob Linares is an old friend from the times he run Spectrum (I think that MaCom ended up with the GaAs crystal growth business he had). Sure there is going t to be a small market for diamond (polycrystalline ) wafers, but INTC is absolutely right, it will not replace Si technology for years to come, the reason is cost. Some 30 years ago, I invented a new family of semiconductors and semiconductor devices (Polaronic Semiconductors, US Patent #3,686,096). I was then at Battelle Memorial Institute, and Battelle's president at the time (Fawcett, if memory serve, the guy that took Helios from a curiosity to commercial viability, after the like of Kodak and GE rejected it, and gave birth to Xerox and Xerography making hundreds of Millions for Battelle), got quite excited since the "beauty" of the devices was that they could be made from impure materials since their properties were derived from field dependence mobility in majority charge carriers materials, rather than field control of the concentration of charge carriers in minority charge carriers materials. He thought that the low cost of raw materials would cause the, then budding, semiconductor industry to jump on this new technology. He went to all the big "houses" of the time and came back with a surprising report. They told him, first we already have more than a billion dollars invested in the transition from Germanium to silicon, we are not looking at a new base wafer, and the cost of purifying and growing "good" single crystal is rapidly coming down, if you could get us a cheap packaging system, we would definitely be interested. Bob Linares should know since he was at the birth of the "future revolution" when GaAs was (and still is) the semiconductor material of the future....yet 20 years later, it still is not 1% or so of the semiconductor business.
Actually, one of the first growers of artificial diamonds from the vapor phase is S. Aisenberg, one of my partners at Invent resources. I even dabbed in it myself depositing it on silicon carbide to improve the tribological properties of seals. Si can be grown commercilly as wafers (I have seen 3 feet diameter crystals myself) a foot in diameter and this without any dislocations or defects. Currently, what Linares is doing are polycrystalline diamond wafers, and extremely expensive ones for that. Look at ISON and their effort to get Si-28 applications, cost will prevent them from getting nothing but some very rare applications. There are always marginal applications for exotic semiconductor materials (like SiC which CREE is specializing in and they have an SiC gem division as well, not doing too well either).
As for Gem, artificial sapphires and rubies (essentially single crystal aluminum oxide lightly doped with cobalt or chromium respectively) have been grown since the 1960 (remember the ruby lasers? these crystal were artificial). The "gems" do not fetch a fraction of the price of natural gems for the simple reason that their supply, unlike natural gems can be unlimited. The same with artificial diamonds, Debeers will make sure of it....
AI
