Debesh Mandal

Co-founder and CEO @nanograb (YC S23)

[Debesh Mandal @debesh]

@PhilipJohnston banger

[Debesh Mandal @debesh]

@tbpn interesting, substitution of religion pseudo-political movements should be studied

[Debesh Mandal @debesh]

Wow, big if true

[Object Zero @Object_Zero_]

Single Crystal CVD Diamond

Have no doubt, you are at the dawn of an industrial revolution. There is a string of breakthroughs happening throughout upstream industries that all compound.

Diamond manufacturing is now able to produce CPU size single crystals wafers.

Currently these are marketed as heat spreaders because they have thermal conductivity of 2,200 W/mK which means they move heat incredibly effectively.

However, that somewhat misses the wood for the trees…

Diamond has physical and electrical properties that exceed traditional silicon, making it uniquely suited for high demand applications.

Thermal Conductivity: Heat is the enemy of electronics. Diamond conducts heat better than almost any other known material, about 5 times better than copper and over 10 times better than silicon.

A diamond chip can act as its own heat sink.

Ultra Wide Bandgap: Diamond can handle massive amounts of voltage and operate at incredibly high temperatures without electrical breakdown.

This makes it perfect for high power applications like electric vehicle inverters, power grids, and aerospace technologies.

High Frequencies: Electrons move very quickly through diamond, allowing chips to operate at much higher frequencies, which is ideal for advanced telecommunications and radar.

Radiation Hardness: Diamond is incredibly resilient to radiation, making diamond based chips ideal for satellites, space exploration, and nuclear facilities.

To make a material act as a semiconductor, you have to "dope" it. To do this you inject impurities into the crystal lattice to create a positive (p-type) or negative (n-type) charge.

Diamond's atomic structure is so tightly packed that forcing other elements into it is hard. While p-type doping (with boron) has been figured out, reliable n-type doping (with phosphorus) remains a massive hurdle.

Theoretical ceilings

Band gap
Silicon wafer = 1.1 eV
Diamond CVD wafer = 5.5eV

Clock speed
Silicon wafer = 5-6 GHz clock wall
Diamond CVD wafer = 1-2 THz clock wall

Max Running Temp
Silicon wafer = 150°C
Diamond CVD wafer = 1,000°C

Whilst we etch silicon with photolithography and Extreme UV light, this doesn’t really work with chemically inert diamond.

Diamond CVD is currently etched with oxygen plasma etching, but this lacks the precision of EUV.

However, we can etch diamond to extreme precision with electron projection lithography. EPL was invented in the 90s by Bell Labs, IBM and Nikkon but abandoned as it was harder than EUV.

Electrons repel each other so the beams blurrs too readily.

What if we built a femto electron beam?
What if we built it to extreme such that it was a ‘single electron’ pulse?

What if we build a microscopic "bed of nails" containing millions of nanoscale tungsten or silicon tips (photocathodes). You shine a massive, highly complex femtosecond laser system across the entire array.

Every time the laser pulses, millions of tiny tips each fire a single, perfectly straight electron at the exact same time.

Turns out, research teams at likes of MIT and Stanford are currently experimenting with exactly this, laser driven nanotip electron emitters.

Pair that tool with Diamond CVD substrate tech and we approach the material limits of both semiconductors and nanotechnology.

Would require asynchronous logic to escape fatal clock skew and operate at full capability.

But I think I will live to see it.

[Arda Göreci @ArdaGoreci]

Today, we are launching our research blog!

We’ll use it for technical notes from our work building tools for enzyme and biomolecular design.

Our first post is about The Unreasonable Redundancy of Nature's Protein Folds.

TLDR: Please don't fold more sequences (1/n)

[Debesh Mandal @debesh]

Exceptional gamesmanship, on par with Mythos suddenly being safe enough for full rollout the day after funding announcement

[Business Insider @BusinessInsider]

Sam Altman said AI budgeting has recently become a "huge issue" for some companies, something that "never came up" earlier this year. https://t.co/P2zODBNmDp

[Debesh Mandal @debesh]

@Jameswise Please fund anything that involves building more vivariums

[Debesh Mandal @debesh]

Assuming this is true, the next wave of aging research will be to extend this pre-peak window of mental acuity and neuroplasticity

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Mathematicians and scientists often peak in their 20s. Why?

Maybe older scientists become stuck in their ways. Or maybe younger researchers feel free to be more creative.

But @jacobkimmel's hypothesis is that this isn't because of social factors at all - it's evolution:

[Debesh Mandal @debesh]

newlimit retro and revmed all based in the bay area

[Debesh Mandal @debesh]

Underwriting the world's risk does actually seem like a worthwhile mission for a company

[Tomas Babej @TomasBabej]

@peterrhague Inside Claude Code, you can just use "!" to execute any bash comamnd directly, i.e. typing "! git status" would work without having the agent to execute it for you.

[Jack O'Meara @Jack_O_Meara]

Opening new R&D site in Boston as folks move to China. Continue to believe US is best place in world for novel platform innovation, and UK for discovery biology.

https://t.co/dlJrUvPQRK

[Dave Messina @DaveMessina]

Health/bio is the greatest investment opportunity of this decade.

[David Willis @ThePrimalDino]

@Blobifie New Glenn is pretty good at not exploding I think

[Debesh Mandal @debesh]

unexpected but smart and necessary whatever your ethical position is (we have a regulator to help with that)

[Jawwwn @jawwwn_]

.@JTLonsdale is breeding monkeys to save America:

“China cut off a lot of things from us. They have this strategy of going after our biotech sector.”

“One of the things you need is to do primate testing.”

“This is very controversial but my 5-year-old gets it.”

“If I say, ‘If Mommy had a very bad disease and were trying to work on a cure, do you want us to test the cure on Mommy, or test it on the monkeys first?’”

“She’s like, ‘Test the monkeys.’ I’m like, ‘How many?’ She’s like, ‘Hundreds of monkeys.’”

“There’s wisdom there. I think human life is more important, even though I feel bad hurting a monkey.”

“There’s not nearly enough primates now. No one will touch it. So we started a company.”

“It’s pro-human.”

Via @jaltma

[Debesh Mandal @debesh]

@0xdoug Gemini has strong chat

[Minh Nhat Nguyen @menhguin]

glad to know Mythos' safety concerns have been addressed right as Anthropic also secured tens of billions in inference compute 👍

[Debesh Mandal @debesh]

@Ronalfa Never been a better time to keep people alive

[Debesh Mandal @debesh]

@GeneInvesting Awesome thanks for the explanation

[Gene Investing w/Anthony 🧬 @GeneInvesting]

Prediction: Lonvo-z is going to give $NTLA more revenue in its FIRST full quarter than Casgevy had in its first NINE QUARTERS $CRSP

Casgevy
FY 2024 = $10 million
FY 2025 = $115.8 million
Q1 2026 = $43 million
9 quarter TOTAL 🟰 $168.8 million
9 quarter CRSP (40%) 🟰 $67.5 million

Intellia will need ~27 patients to equal Crispr’s $67.5 million (assuming $2.5m per patient).