The discovery at the Royal Signals & Radar Establishment in Malvern, Worcestershire that porous Silicon could be made to emit light by stimulating it with a laser (CI No 1,667), has led directly to announcements by separate teams at IBM Corp and Spire Corp that they have now succeeded in making porous Silicon emit light by stimulating it electrically, a first step to creating opto-electronic devices that convert electrical signals into light and could be used to make speed-critical interconnections in computers, the Wall Street Journal reports; porous Silicon junctions will likely have to be encapsulated because the optical property fades when they are exposed to light.
