THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT will start a joint research project with industry in fiscal year 2003 to develop diamond-based semiconductors, an advanced chip technology that could one day replace silicon as the base for super fast, high voltage semiconductors, it said on Friday.

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Driven by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), part of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), the project has a budget of $6 million for the financial year starting in April 2003. The project is expected to last for several years.

Diamond chips can work at a temperature of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, while silicon chips stop working above 150 degrees Celsius, according to Hideyo Okushi, principal research scientist at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), which has been researching diamond chips in several projects. This property means that diamond chips can work at a much higher frequency or faster speed and be placed in a high-temperature environment, such as a vehicle's engine.

Diamond can also resist voltages up to around 200 volts, compared to around 20 volts for a silicon chip. This means power electronics, such as an inverter, can become much smaller in size. At present, a large number of silicon chips are used together to handle high voltages which makes devices large, Okushi said.

Flat panel display electrodes based on diamond can also release more electrons, and the life span of devices using diamond electrodes can be double or longer than the equivalent with silicon, he said.

However, diamond chips are not expected to completely replace silicon chips for another 20 years because of two major bottlenecks, Okushi predicted.

Although artificial diamond for chips has been developed, it is still much more expensive than silicon. A four-millimeter-square diamond substrate costs several hundreds of dollars compared to virtually nothing for silicon, he said. Another problem is that electricity cannot travel smoothly through diamond. Thus, engineers are seeking impurities which can be added to aid electricity flow.

Some major Japanese electronics companies are already active in diamond chip development and are expected to apply to join the project. Kobe Steel Ltd. is investigating the basic material used for diamond chips while Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd. is working on artificial diamond production.

For its part, Okushi's project team hopes to be able to use diamond chips to develop an ultra-violet laser with a 235-nanometer wavelength, which is even shorter than the 405-nanometer blue laser being eyed for next generation optical disc technologies and is expected to be used for higher capacity optical storage systems.