Light-emitting silicon overcomes a major obstacle to denser, faster chips

guest · Apr 13, 2020

Light-emitting silicon overcomes a major obstacle to denser, faster chips
It's a solution 50 years in the making
April 13, 2020
https://www.engadget.com/light-emitting-silicon-nanowires-235805855.html

The push for ever-smaller chips has been running into more and more obstacles, including the very limits of silicon — while optical connections would allow for denser, speedier processors by eliminating heat and energy issues, silicon is lousy at emitting light.

Scientists have been pursuing this for about 50 years, the university said, and a team created hexagonal silicon back in 2015. However, they couldn’t get the result to emit light until now, when they reduced the number of impurities and defects.
The team still needs to produce a laser before they have technology that could be used in chips, and there would still be plenty of refinement left before you would see this in shipping electronics. That laser is expected in 2020, though.
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New Breakthrough Eliminates The Need To Cram More Transistors In CPU

As reported by Wired, researchers from Europe have attained a breakthrough that could solve the issue of increasing the number of transistors in a chip every two years as stated by Moore’s law. The new research could make the law obsolete altogether.

Research led by Erik Bakkers, a physicist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands has led to the invention of silicon alloy nanowires that can emit light. The breakthrough could allow the development of photon-based circuits instead of the currently used electron-transistor model.
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ScienceDaily: Revolutionary light-emitting silicon

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