CHANNELS: TECHNOLOGY AND BUSINESS
August 01, 2005
Making Light of Silicon
By Steven Ashley
Scientists have long sought to build lasers from silicon. Such an advance would enable engineers to incorporate both electronic and optical devices onto cheap silicon chips rather than being compelled to employ costly-to-make lasers based on "exotic" semiconductor materials such as gallium arsenide or indium phosphide.
Silicon lasers could lead to affordable light-based systems that harness photons instead of electrons to shuttle huge amounts of data swiftly--at multigigabit-per-second rates. Two research groups, one at the University of California at Los Angeles and the other at Intel Corporation, have recently reported success in making silicon emit continuous laser light.