New Funding for Silicon Light

Si-Light Technologies Ltd, a spinoff company from the University of Surrey, announced that it has received equity seed funding worth £150,000 ($284,000) from the Cascade Fund to develop silicon-based light emitters. Si-Light said it will use the money to complete designs for demonstration prototypes and to achieve performance milestones that will attract investors. Si-Light’s patented silicon light-emitter technology enables the manufacturing of efficient silicon LEDs that emit light in the 1.2 to 1.5 µm spectrum, compatible with standard semiconductor manufacturing processes. It is based on the discovery by its founder, Kevin Homewood, a professor at the University of Surrey, that silicon featuring so-called "dislocation loops" can emit light. These loops, formed by implanting the silicon with rare-earth materials, produce strains that confine charge carriers and improve the silicon's radiative efficiency. "The frequency of light emission depends on what is implanted in the silicon," said Si-Light CEO Kevin Arthur. "We want to look at different rare-earths and their impact on what is effectively a silicon LED. We have world-leading technology here, and this new award from Cascade puts us on track to demonstrate silicon LEDs that will revolutionize the production of inexpensive optoelectronic transceivers for applications such as rack-to-rack parallel communications, optical backplanes and fiber-to-the-home systems. We are very excited about the prospects for this potentially game-changing technology." Si-Light is based in the SETsquared facility at Surrey Research Park in Guildford, England. The Cascade Fund was created to stimulate entrepreneurial activity and provide financial and business assistance to help commercialize inventions and ideas arising from the research of its five partner universities: Brunel, Reading, Royal Holloway, Surrey and Sussex.