Projects / Read and costed
Synthetic diamond
Horizon An idea with sources behind it and nothing built. Published so it can be argued with.
Diamond conducts heat better than any other bulk material, and heat limits chips. The survey asks where the heat is held up in practice, and the answer is rarely the bulk material.
Drawn from Jo's survey, Part II.
Where the limit sits
The survey's finding, repeated across five unrelated fields, is that the binding constraint is the boundary and not the material. For diamond that means interface thermal resistance: how well heat crosses from the chip into the diamond, not how well it travels once inside.
A diamond layer alone therefore solves little. The interface decides the result.
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Established
Nitrogen-vacancy centre coherence times of roughly 1.8 ms at room temperature in high-purity, carbon-13 enriched crystals with optimised doping. Room temperature quantum sensing is real.
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Established
Diamond betavoltaics are real as a micropower source for devices that sip power in places you cannot reach.
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Sources conflict
A widely repeated efficiency claim was found to be falsified as stated. The real sourced figure is a projected improvement of around 15% in hot ambient conditions, which is commercially meaningful and much smaller than advertised.
What is not known here
The open items for this project. Work on it starts here.
- Whether there is enough diamond supply for "a layer on every chip" is examined in the survey and not settled.
- Nothing here is buildable at home. This area is for reading and arguing, not for making.