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)"

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.

Re:Then I was like.... HUH???

[Anonymous Coward]

Several have commented on how inefficient a silicon-based integrated device is at producing light as compared to other more optimal devices long perfected in the solid state physics world.

I find this quite entertaining for the simple reason that this same situation of efficiency mismatch was at the heart of the invention of the integrated circuit (invented independently by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce (then at Fairchild, prior to starting Intel)). Jack Kilby in particular was struggling with the "tyranny of numbers problem." This was because,basically, prior to the coming of integration, trying to build useful circuits out of full-sized components and wire them all together was simply too complex to actually do in a practical way. Kilby needed to convince his boss to let him do an experiment where he would put more than one device together in a solid state material and he knew that TI had put a ton of effort into how to work with Silicon. He realized that even though Silicon was a "horrible" choice for making resistors and capacitors, that in fact it *could* be done and that combined with the fact that Silicon made great transistors, which are by far the most prevalent device in logic circuits, an efficient overall process might be reached. The electronics world of the time gave a collective laugh, thinking the use of non-optimal materials for the non-transistor components of this "ugly chunk of rock" was silly and that the process of making these "integrated chip things" would be way too expensive to compete with traditional circuits. We all know how things turned out. -TitaniumTurtle