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I was pleasantly surprised to find out that diamond and silicon share a tetragonal crystal structure, and here they mention their buckyball material here is har
by jazzyjackson 5y ago
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that diamond and silicon share a tetragonal crystal structure, and here they mention their buckyball material here is harder than diamond and more conductive to boot. So what advantages could carbon computers have over silicon I wonder?
"The resulting material’s physical properties depend on the ratio of sp2 to sp3 carbons. Raising the temperature during synthesis increases the sp3 fraction, producing a harder material." - I know silicon is doped with impurities to make it more or less conductive, so if you can control the band-gap during synthesis, perhaps transistors could be baked directly into this carbon-glass bucky-stuff.
- blix 5y agoDiamond's band gap is 5.5eV; it's not too hard to be more conductive. Based on their expeerimental procedure controlling band gap carefully would be pretty difficult. Graphene-based materials probably represent a better path forward than Diamond-based.
- phkahler 5y agoDiamond can be doped - I think with Boron and has very high thermal conductivity. Diamond semiconductors are also hard to grow.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]