Word: semiconductor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...giant J Sainsbury. Abu Dhabi, like Dubai, a constituent part of the United Arab Emirates, says its Mubadala Development Co. will pay $1.35 billion for a 7.5% share of the U.S.-based private-equity investment firm Carlyle Group, which owns a diverse range of megacompanies, from chipmaker Freescale Semiconductor and nursing-home operator Manor Care to airplane-parts manufacturer Sequa Corp...
...investment, but a reliable one. China and the gulf states, though, are aiming higher. On May 20, the Chinese government said that it was paying $3 billion for just less than 10% of the Blackstone Group, the U.S.'s leading private-equity firm, which owns everything from Freescale Semiconductor to Michaels Stores. The next day, Saudi Basic Industries Corp. said it was buying General Electric's plastics division--the storied operation based in Pittsfield, Mass., where former GE boss Jack Welch earned his stripes--for $11.6 billion...
...soon followed up the blue LED with the first bright green and white LEDs. An LED is a semiconductor that generates light, but very little heat, when an electric current is passed through it. Different semiconductor materials produce different colors; Nakamura used gallium nitride, which generates blue and white light. The resulting LEDs use as little as one-seventh the energy as an incandescent bulb and can last about 100 times as long, up to 100,000 hours. If they were widely used, LEDs could lead to enormous energy savings and carbon-emissions reductions. In the developing world, LEDs paired...
Still, creating a diamond semiconductor is no easy feat. Rather than trying to mimic the conditions under which diamond is generated deep in the earth, Apollo, Element Six and most of the other leading diamondmakers are relying on a process called chemical vapor deposition (CVD). It's a low-pressure, high-temperature method that uses heat energy from plasma and a combination of gases to rain carbon atoms on a starter seed of the gem, which gradually grows into a larger single-crystal diamond. CVD produces a more uniform, consistent diamond in sizes large enough to make an effective transistor...
Apollo and its competitors are close to perfecting the manufacturing process, but it's unlikely that man-made diamond will replace silicon entirely. Diamond manufacturing remains expensive, even after several spikes in silicon-wafer prices over the past year. But semiconductor researchers remain optimistic about diamond's future role; at the very least, a combination of silicon and diamond could produce more powerful devices that run at cooler temperatures. Says Mike Mayberry, director of components research at Intel: "We're still interested enough to keep...