Light from Silicon

by Salvatore Coffa IEEE Spectrum, October 2005 Silicon’s absence from critical optical applications has long bothered semiconductor specialists. If photons could be easily coaxed from silicon, we could do marvelous things. Imagine plugging your office PC into an optical-fiber local area network and pulling files from a distant server at tens of gigabits per second -- enormous, highdefinition video files popping onto the screen instantaneously. Optical fibers linking the microchips within a PC would accelerate its computing speed as bandwidth bottlenecks from its motherboard’s copper wiring disappeared. The key to that vision is the fabrication of efficient, electrically driven light sources that work at room temperature and are produced using materials and processes compatible with the manufacturing methods currently used to make ordinary silicon memory and microprocessor chips. Read more