MrSeb writes with this excerpt from an article in Extreme Tech: "Light-emitting diodes are a cornerstone of customer tech. They make thin-and-light TVs and smartphones possible, provide productive household, handheld, and automobile illumination, and, of course, without LEDs your router would not have blinkenlights. Thanks to some engineers from MIT, though, a new diode looks set to steal the humble LED's thunder. Dubbed a diode for light, and crafted using gauge silicon chip fabrication techniques, this is a key strike that will pave the path to photonic (as opposed to electronic) pathways on compatible chips and circuit boards. The diode for light — which is made from a thin layer of garnet — is transparent in one direction, but opaque in the other. Garnet is usually hard to deposit on a silicon wafer, but the MIT researchers found a way to do it."

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