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

Re:Very challenging to do

[Drakula]

You have a very good point.

However, the fact that Si has an indirect bandgap means it will never be as efficient as its direct gap brethren, such as GaAs.

The addition of a rare earth element such as Erbium increase the light output substantially as you say. However, the emission spectrum is very broad and likely undesired. A rare earth dopant and a resonant cavity structure however would be a good candidate for efficient emission.

New way of doing case mods?

[athlon02]

No more need to buy cases with neon lights in them... just grab the latest motherboard from your favorite mobo manufacturer and voila :)

But in all seriousness, after I saw the article a while back (on slashdot) with something about optical traces on a motherboard in about 5 years from now, it had me very intrigued. I mean if you can shave a few nanoseconds from every bus cycle that's gotta be worth 10% increase in performance eventually. Especially on a clawhammer/sledgehammer where you've eliminated the north bridge part of the chipset.

LES Hardware

[MadocGwyn]

People keep saying it'd be cool to see the 'flashing' of LES CPU's etc, or the blue green codeing guys comment. You do relize, they would be flipping so fast that you would not be able to see the change, just a glow.