Centaurus Diamond Tech. Inc. (fka CTDT)

[bizops12]

A little research for everyones enjoyment:

These clips are from an article in 2003 - The issues they discuss have never been resolved because the processes currently used to manufacture synthetic diamonds simply cannot fix them. The CTDT process does:

But the greatest potential for CVD diamond lies in computing. If diamond is ever to be a practical material for semiconducting, it will need to be affordably grown in large wafers. (The silicon wafers Intel uses, for example, are 1 foot in diameter.) CVD growth is limited only by the size of the seed placed in the Apollo machine.

Jim Butler is the head of a project known as Code 6174 - the Navy's diamond research arm, which is housed in a guarded facility outside Washington, DC. A civilian scientist, Butler has been been researching CVD diamond and semiconducting for the military for 16 years, long enough to see plenty of failure in the field. But today, he's more optimistic than ever. There have been three long-standing roadblocks to diamond semiconducting - and each of them appears to be on the verge of falling. First, diamond is viewed as wildly expensive, due to the artificial scarcity that De Beers maintains with its lock on the market. Synthesized diamonds created outside of the cartel will greatly reduce that problem. Second, there has never been a steady and dependable supply of large, pure diamonds. You can't depend on mined diamonds, as there is no way to ensure that each stone will have the same electrical properties as the next. Apollo's CVD diamonds solve that.
The third big challenge has been the most daunting for materials scientists: To form microchip circuits, positive and negative conductors are needed. Diamond is an inherent insulator - it doesn't conduct electricity. But both Gemesis and Apollo have been able to inject boron into the lattice, which creates a positive charge. Until now, though, no one had been able to manufacture a negatively charged, or n-type, diamond with sufficient conductivity. When I visit Butler in Washington, he can barely contain his glee. "There's been a major breakthrough," he tells me. In June, together with scientists from Israel and France, he announced a novel way of inverting boron's natural conductivity to form a boron-doped n-type diamond. "We now have a p-n junction," Butler says. "Which means that we have a diamond semiconductor that really works. I can now see an Intel diamond Pentium chip on the horizon."
Still, Butler is frustrated with what he thinks of as myopia in the US computer business. "Europe and Japan have been investing in diamond semiconductor research," he says, citing the Japanese government's announcement in December that it would begin allocating $6 million a year to build a first-generation diamond chip. "Bob Linares has given the US the advantage, but nobody's paying any attention," he says. "If we're not careful, the Japanese or the Europeans are going to claim the diamond niche."
Indeed, Intel's top materials executives weren't aware of the latest research breakthroughs when I spoke to them in June, although they certainly understood the potential for diamonds in computing. "Diamonds represent a seismic change in semiconductors," says Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, Intel's director of communications circuits research. "It takes us about 10 years to evaluate a new material. We have a lot of investment in silicon. We're not about to abandon that."
But someday, that's exactly what chipmakers will be forced to do. Just ask Bernhardt Wuensch, an MIT professor of materials science. "If Moore's law is going to be maintained, processors are going to get hotter and hotter," he tells me. "Eventually, silicon is just going to turn into a puddle. Diamond is the solution to that problem."

Link to full article - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html