Light Emitting Silicon Steps It Up

h4mm3r writes "STMicroelectronics plans to announce a breakthrough on Monday in light-emitting silicon that could lead to a new generation of more powerful computing processors and more efficient automobile components as well as potentially higher-speed optical data-transmission systems. (gotta register, free yadda yadda)"

Comments

Very challenging to do

[Cutie Pi]

One of the things this article really doesn't elaborate on is just how difficult the road has been to make efficient light emitting silicon. I had a professor as an undergraduate at the University of Rochester who spent a significant amount of time trying to get it to work. The article doesn't go into the technology, but I'm guessing they're using porous silicon. Porous-Si has small nanometer scale pores in (etched via electochemistry). The pores effectively alter the band gap of the silicon, increasing it to that of the compound light-emitting semiconductors such as GaAs. While this technique works well at generating light, the problem is getting it to generate light efficiently. Hence the exotic rare-earth materials such as erbium. I'm impressed that STMicroelectronics was able to increase the light output 100-fold. Extravagent claims such as these make me want to take a wait-and-see attitude. The process might be so difficult that it wont be practicle on high-performance chips for some time. Also, the processing techniques of light emitting silicon is different than for standard logic. I'd like to see how well these two processes can be merged.