And if you can't get light emission from a silicon chip, miniaturized and efficient optoelectronics is but a dream. Fortunately some of these problems have begun to be solved in the past couple of years. If research progresses at the present rate, optoelectronics will help a new, streamlined information technology achieve astonishing things by the end of the decade. The world is already wired with light. Glass optical fibres carry information-laden laser pulses across thousands of kilometres in the blink of an eye.
Optical fibres can convey much more information than copper wires.
But at the moment, an e-mail, for example, is first converted from electronic to photonic form before being transmitted. Ultimately scientists and technologists hope to find ways of processing signals encoded in light, instead of just transmitting them that way, so that photonic technology can replace electronics. But that dream remains a long way off. Today's version of optoelectronics is a shotgun marriage, in which neither party seems very happy. Silicon is a semiconductor , a material whose electrical conductivity can be delicately adjusted.